


Harry Potter and the Boy from Lima

by narceus



Series: Blaine Anderson and the Improbable Crossover [2]
Category: Glee, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crossover, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-09-16
Updated: 2012-02-11
Packaged: 2017-10-23 19:20:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 44,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/253966
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/narceus/pseuds/narceus
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kurt's been starting to realize that Blaine is a little bit of a mess and a lot less unreal than he lets on. _This_ is not Kurt's idea of 'less unreal'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Here we have it! The long-awaited sequel to Harry Potter and the High School Show Choir has arrived. More or less. I expect the second half of this to be up within the week; it's largely written, just finishing touches. Every thank you in the world to crown_of_weeds, who I'm pretty sure I'm internet-engaged to at this point, who sat through the whole long slog of me writing it with flattery and encouragement and only tried to get me to go back to writing about werewolves about once every week or two. Thanks also to needsmoregreen, who offered valuable help and support in nailing down the details.
> 
> See notes at the end if you don't recognize some of the songs quoted herein. I made every effort to keep the depiction of Cincinnati as accurate as possible (down to what musicals were actually playing the week of March 21, 2011), but I've never actually been there so it may all be off, for which I apologize.

It all starts with the snake.

Well, no. Quite a few things started much earlier than that, months or even years, really. Kurt supposes it depends on what's the 'it' you're talking about. His painfully epic crush on Blaine, for instance, was well underway by last December, and while he'd love to be able to say that everything started going _wrong_ with the Valentine's Day Gap Incident, Jeremiah's mere existence tends to suggest that he and Blaine hadn't been on the same page for quite some time before then. Probably the beginning of discovering just what kind of _weird_ Blaine really has in his life happens with the snake. The start of everything leading up to _that_ , though, came about three and a half weeks earlier, in the aftermath of the Great Alcohol Debacle of 2011.

If one good thing came of the entire situation, Kurt had figured at the time, it was the near-unholy friendship of Burt Hummel and Mathilda Anderson. That is, _if_ that was a good thing. He retained the right to reserve all judgment on that one.

What happened was this: Kurt wasn't entirely clear on the details, but sometime during the week of arguments and bicurious experimentation, Mathilda found out about Blaine's little bender last Saturday night and revoked his car privileges right up through spring break. Blaine was going to drive down to Cincinnati to get lectured at for the weekend, before his sister drove him back to Dalton on Sunday and took the car back with her until she'd decided he'd learned his lesson. Also, while she was there, she wanted to have dinner with Kurt.

"You really don't have to," Blaine insisted apologetically over coffee. "It's just, she's heard a lot about you, and now I've crashed at your place while drunk..."

"So just to be clear, this _is_ about her wanting to interrogate and intimidate me over bringing her baby brother to a party full of alcohol and letting him booze it up on mystery punch and wine coolers until he passed out?" Kurt asked. Blaine winced.

"She's really not all that mad about it, she just has to act like she is. Look, she's...she's not as bad as she seems at first, I swear."

"Well, that's reassuring," Kurt said dryly. "Lucky for you, I have excellent table manners."

It wasn't a meeting he was looking forward to, exactly, though Kurt would confess to some curiosity about the mysterious older sister who'd been raising Blaine since his aunt and uncle decided to retire and move to Boca. Or, well, who'd put him through boarding school to raise himself, Kurt supposed. Still, Blaine always spoke of her with an obvious mixture of awe and affection, and it made him wonder just how much of Blaine came from her, his family, his childhood, and how much was just...Blaine. Ridiculously charming, implausibly insecure, beautiful, talented, oblivious boy that he was, Kurt sort of hated that even after everything, he was still a little in love with him. Or more than a little, if he was completely honest with himself, but Kurt makes it a policy to never be quite entirely honest with himself. One must tender one's little illusions, after all.

His first mistake was bringing it up at Friday night dinner when his father asked what time he was driving back to school on Sunday.

"You know, I'd like to meet that sister of his some time," Burt said. Kurt's eyes widened, but he didn't deliberately knock Carole's candlesticks over and set the tablecloth on fire to derail the rest of the conversation instantly. This was his second mistake.

"Well, maybe if she has time to come down for Regionals--you know how it is, full-time job, single parental-figure, busy life," Kurt said quickly. His dad had his considering look on.

"No, I'm serious," he said. "You've been spending a lot of time with this kid, and I know you say there's nothing going on--"

"That's because there's nothing going on."

"I don't know, dude, he got pretty handsy while we were getting him home," Finn chimed in oh-so-helpfully, and Kurt set himself a reminder to put bleach in his laundry or run all his whites on hot with something bright red that weekend. He grit his teeth.

"He was also drunk enough to make out with Rachel Berry, and no, he doesn't make a habit of it, it was a one-time thing," Kurt said. He was making mincemeat of his poached chicken breast. He forced himself to breathe deeply and take a small bite. "The drunkenness or the making out with girls, as it turns out."

"Hey, I'm just saying, I know how teenagers can be, and I know 'not a thing' can turn into a real big thing pretty fast," said his dad. "And either way, he's your friend. I'm not allowed to want to know about your friends now?"

"We've met almost all the other parents in your glee club at McKinley, at least once or twice," Carole said. It was true, and for a while Kurt had been thrilled at how well his dad got along with the Joneses, but in the face of imminent mortification by his entire family he was willing to take it all back.

"I'm not even sure we could set something up. She's an FBI agent, Blaine says she gets called out of town on cases all the time, that's why he's at boarding school," Kurt tried as a last-ditch effort.

"Well, she's definitely going to be down at that school of yours this weekend, right?" asked Burt. "Maybe you should give that Blaine a call, see if she'd mind having a whole family getting-to-know-you dinner." He punctuated it with a wag of his knife in Kurt's general direction, apparently totally content at having arranged things precisely to his satisfaction.

"This is a disaster," he groaned onto Mercedes' shoulder later that night.

"Boy, until you've been hurled all over by a couple of drunk ex-cheerleaders on stage in front of the entire student body, you do not even get to talk about disaster," Mercedes told him, not at all sympathetically. "Last I heard Rachel still can't get the smell out. And her dads come back tomorrow. You _know_ that's gonna be a more awkward conversation than the one you've got to look forward to."

Kurt tilted his head up to look at her and sighed. "It's going all wrong, 'cedes. He was supposed to impress my parents by being all suave and gentlemanly, and I was supposed to meet his sister after being touted for several months as the attractive, fabulous love of his life, not the boy who got him drunk at a party and then yelled at him for having an identity crisis. And they definitely weren't supposed to meet each other and spoil the illusion."

Mercedes patted his shoulder, because she knew better than to touch his hair. "You do realize if you actually were dating instead of sitting here being all pathetic about it, they'd probably have to meet sooner or later?"

"I was hoping to put it off a reasonable amount of time, like until our wedding," Kurt said. "If at all possible, our future children's high school graduation."

"Boo, you have got to man up and quit being pathetic about this," Mercedes said, shrugging him off her shoulder and more or less upright. "It's just some family meeting each other. What could go wrong?"

"Mmm, his sister could decide to chew me out for the whole party thing in front of my dad, my dad could decide that Blaine really is an irresponsible jerk and a terrible influence who he doesn't want me hanging out with any more, his sister could decide she hates _me_ and convince Blaine that he shouldn't be my friend, they could start pulling out embarrassing childhood stories and _baby pictures_ \--"

"Okay, slow down already, would you?" Mercedes cut him off. "We're gonna put on _Bring It On_ and get your mind off it, because this much pathetic is starting to bring me down, and I'm the one who spent the week in a drunken, hungover haze before getting chewed out by Mr. Shue. And I'm _not_ grounded, so don't you go repeating that to _my_ parents."

"Wouldn't dream of it," Kurt promised.

"Wanna go down and get the popcorn while I set up the movie?" Mercedes asked. "Let you skip the butter this once."

"Just this once," Kurt agreed.

 

 

He spent the next day and a half fretting silently and trying to plan for contingencies. Embarrassing childhood stories aside, given everything he knew of Blaine's sister, he simply couldn't imagine their respective families getting _along_. Mathilda, to hear Blaine tell it, was eight feet tall and ate serial killers for breakfast. She was his original source for old records and romantic comedies. Possibly aside from a very early childhood Blaine's always been oddly vague about, Cincinnati was the smallest city she'd ever lived in. Kurt adored his father beyond all other people in the universe, but 'cosmopolitan' had never exactly been a word that described Burt Hummel or his attitude towards the world.

As FBI agents went, Mathilda Anderson reminded Kurt more of Coach Bieste than Clarice Starling. Maybe Sandra Bullock at the beginning of _Miss Congeniality_. She wasn't huge, but she was solid—and an inch and a half taller than Blaine, which she obviously used to great advantage. Her hair, which was pulled severely back from her face in a braid so tight it hurt his forehead to even look at, was heartbreakingly tragic, as were her eyebrows. She had Blaine's eyebrows. No woman should ever have to suffer that.

She nudged Blaine into the corner booth with her shoulder, and he settled in with a good-natured roll of his eyes. Kurt slid around the other side to the relative safety of Blaine's right, leaving the end to his dad and Carole. Finn was back in Lima, supposedly doing last-minute homework and probably trying to beat Puck's high score on Call of Duty, thank Gaga for small mercies.

"Mr. and Mrs. Hummel, glad you could make it," she greeted pleasantly. "And Kurt, finally. Blaine's been telling me about you."

"Only the very best lies, I hope," Kurt responded before he could bite his tongue back. Blaine's sister smiled, though, which was a better reaction than Kurt had gotten used to for his nervous jokes.

"Miss Anderson," Burt said. "Or--is it Agent Anderson? Kurt said you worked for the FBI..."

"Special Agent, but call me Mathilda," she said, and oh, Kurt could see where Blaine got his charming smile from. Funny, he'd thought Blaine learned that from Cary Grant.

"Burt," his dad said with a wide, welcoming smile, extending his hand across the table for shaking. "My wife Carole." And that was when Kurt started to get the sinking feeling that he'd been worried about all the very _wrong_ things about this meeting.

"I have to thank you two," Mathilda said, still with that charming grin--and how was it that Blaine's unnatural Gap obsession was actually the pinnacle of fashion refinement in this family? She slung an arm around Blaine's shoulders. "I hear you took care of this little delinquent on a certain night he is most definitely grounded over for the next few weeks."

"Of course," said Carole. "Blaine's welcome on our couch any time." She didn't put the emphasis on 'couch' that Kurt knew his dad would have, but that was because, after surviving Babygate last year, Carole tended to be a lot more sympathetic about things like that. Not that Kurt had ever needed to take her up on it--mostly it was just about Finn getting to close the door to his room when Rachel came over so the rest of the house didn't have to listen to her singing--but it was nice to know. In case.

"Not that we expect this kind of thing to happen again," Burt added. "Not saying we wouldn't be happy to have him stay over instead of driving two hours in the middle of the night if he's too tired to stay on the road, but drinking's never been a problem with Kurt, and I don't expect it to start now." Kurt winced. So he hadn't exactly been forgiven for the Great Alcohol Debacle, either. Great. This was all Puckerman's fault.

"Nah, Blaine's always been a good kid," Mathilda said, reaching out to run an affectionate hand across the top of Blaine's gel-shellacked hair. "Sometimes even the good ones just need a little..."

"Reminder," said Burt.

"Guidance?" suggested Carole, in a tone Kurt didn't think sounded quite entirely safe.

"Exactly," said Mathilda, in a satisfied sort of tone that Kurt _knew_ , from the way Blaine tensed up next to him, was not safe at all.

It got worse depressingly quickly. Dad, as it turns out, _loved_ that Mathilda was an independent woman with enough devotion to family to do as right by her little brother as she could, even if it interfered with her own life. Admittedly, Kurt had to respect her for that too, but it was sort of disturbing how the light of shared single parent pain shone out through the eyes of all adults present. Mathilda loved that his dad liked old classic action movies and _Deadliest Catch_.

"You didn't tell me she watched _Deadliest Catch_ ," Kurt hissed to Blaine over the dregs of his spinach canneloni, while everyone else laughed uproariously over some joke about crab fishermen. If he'd known, he could have put it on the 'safe topics of conversation' list, preferably _before_ the somehow simultaneously touching and completely humiliating discussion of how best to bond with your gay teenager over their inevitable celebrity crushes.

"I didn't _know_ ," Blaine hissed back. "She does all sorts of things when I'm not around, and then she pulls them out right when you least expect it."

"They're five minutes away from exchanging phone numbers and setting up regular dinner outings," Kurt realized gloomily. "We're doomed."

The adults did, in fact, exchange phone numbers, as well as e-mail addresses. Mathilda left them at the front door of Dalton with a kiss on Blaine's cheek and an admonishment that Carole "had better send those recipes along!" Kurt got two hugs, and even in the face of approaching doom via parental bonding he could never truly fail to appreciate his dad's hugs, followed by Burt calling over his shoulder that Mathilda "ought to make it up to Lima some time, we may not have fancy culture like you're used to, but we've got one hell of a bowling alley." They were making plans to drive two hours to go _bowling_ together. His life was over.

"It can't be that bad, right?" Blaine said distantly as they stand side by side, watching the cars pull out of the parking lot. "Lima and Cincinnati are two hours away, and Mathilda doesn't really have a lot of time on her hands..."

"My father learned to Skype for me," Kurt said. "Dad and Carole have no friends. We can never trust them with anything we do here or anything involving each other again." His dad was no idiot. And maybe confiding in him about a crush he'd pretty much already figured out was one thing, but if Burt was going to start sharing 'oh, isn't it hard raising a gay brother/son' details with Blaine's sister, complete with anecdotes about Finn and Sam... "Please don't think less of me for any of the stories they tell her."

"Deal," Blaine said instantly. "Please don't run away if she starts talking about proper gun maintenance over dinner some time."

"Wait, we're going to have to go through this again?" Kurt asked. Blaine just nodded, still gazing off down Dalton's driveway with the thousand-yard stare of a soldier still taking in the shock of his last battle.

"Yep," he said. "I would bet on it."

 

 

Kurt's third big mistake was in underestimating Sue Sylvester. He'd just seen her make so many over-the-top empty threats since he'd joined New Directions that he didn't think anything of her warning when he turned down her secret conspiracy in the Lima Bean. He had a lot more to worry about at the time, anyway—namely, somehow convincing Blaine that he knew anything at all about what it was like to feel sexy.

Honestly, the whole thing was a disaster from the beginning. The girls in the audience did nothing for him but make him feel self-conscious, the giant foam machine seemed more messy and childish than anything else, and if 'Animal' really counted as a sexy song, he'd been thinking about everything all wrong from the start. Not that Kurt was surprised by that.

After all, there were those kisses—sweet, bland ones with Brittany, the terrifying, heart-pounding single kiss in the locker room. Sexiness was supposed to make your pulse race, right, but they couldn't mean like _that_ , could they? Maybe that was the key he'd been missing all along, the thing he just wasn't letting himself feel. If it was then Kurt wanted no part of it. He'd take meaningless hand holding with Brittany over the adrenaline rush of Karofsky any day.

But now _Blaine_ wanted 'sexy' from him, with this song, in this warehouse, and Kurt was going to do his best to give it to him even if he had no idea what it actually meant. He would. He was. _Blaine asked him_ to do this song, Blaine whose idea of sexiness was apparently somewhere between drunken spin-the-bottle and an overblown GAP serenade. Kurt could do it. He could at least try. He just couldn't, it turned out, try hard enough.

Afterwards, when the whole baby penguin fiasco was over, when the most embarrassing father/son conversation of his life had been somehow lived through, that's what Kurt would remember best about the whole situation. That he'd tried. And that it really came nowhere near to working anyway.

 

 

It all got swept under the rug pretty neatly, when Regionals was mysteriously postponed two weeks at the second-to-last second for no apparent reason. That would have been enough to make Kurt suspect Coach Sylvester's meddling hands, but it just so happened that the new competition date fell right _after_ spring break—a week after it, for Dalton, and on the last Saturday of vacation for both McKinley and Westvale. Wes nearly had an aneurysm when he found out, which would be nothing, Kurt suspected, to Rachel's reaction when she heard about the 100% mandatory, not-missable-for-anything-other-than-critical-hospitalization annual Jones family spring break road trip to visit Grandma Didi in Missouri. They'd probably hear the screams all the way in Westerville.

If they were audible over the shouting. "We _cannot_ spend an entire week this close to competition without a practice!" David barked.

"This is an outrage!" said Trent.

"Warblers, Warblers, we _can_ overcome this!" Blaine tried to soothe everyone, though Kurt could have told him it would be to no avail.

"I move that we ban all spring break travel activities and schedule daily rehearsals," said Wes. The whole room erupted into excited murmuring. Even David looked sideways at him for that one.

"Section 132-B of the Warblers Code clearly states that in situations with less than two week's notice, Warbler activities may not be required to overturn preexisting large-value financial commitments provided those commitments were made with good faith expectation of personal time," Thad rattled off over the din.

"That rule is strictly limited to non-refundable commitments valued at over $1000," Wes snapped back, and Kurt felt a sudden, unprecedented pang of pity for any Warbler who'd been foolish enough to invest in any $980 vacation plans. "And Section 132-A for family commitments clearly states that one week is sufficient notice to break any commitment other than a wedding, immediate family graduation, grandparent's milestone birthday party, or travel--"

"Exceeding a thousand miles or crossing national borders," David interrupted. "Which applies to several members of the Warblers, including yourself."

"And I would be willing to sacrifice my annual trip to Japan for the sake of our chance at Regionals," Wes said sharply. Kurt couldn't help rolling his eyes a little as Warblers broke into argument around him. He'd have bet his entire scarf collection that nobody in New Directions was worried about a missing trip to London or Barbados. On the other hand, the entire school was probably going to be not just locked down cordoned off by the National Guard and the CDC for a week, knowing Coach Sylvester; at least the Warblers would have a week in their own practice space to tighten things up once they got back.

"Let's call for a vote," David said. "How many Warblers have plans that they cannot be compelled to break under Sections 132-A or B?" Kurt keeps his hand firmly in his lap, since a drive he made every weekend and a commitment to sit on a stool in his dad's shop making sarcastic comments about the state of the books wouldn't even qualify as an exemption under the Section 132-C provisions for one-day cancellation notice. Blaine didn't raise his hand, either, but a little over half the assembled Warblers did, Wes and David included.

"We cannot mandate a meeting when fewer than half of our members can be compelled to be present, particularly if that includes two-thirds of the council," Thad said. "The Warblers cannot be compelled to meet over Spring Break."

Chaos. Of course, chaos in the Warblers' room compared to chaos in the McKinley High choir room was like comparing an exceptionally intense chess match to a bar brawl. Kurt met Blaine's eyes with slightly raised eyebrows. Of the whole assembled group, Blaine had the best chance of injecting some sanity into the proceedings.

"Order! Order!" Wes was shouting, pounding the gavel for all he was worth. "I propose that we instead institute daily two-hour Skype conference practices to keep us in--"

"This is an outrage!" declared Nick, this time, leading Trent to turn and start berating him, while further argument broke out all across the room. Wes's gavel was becoming ineffective through overuse, particularly since David had started arguing with him at the Council table while Thad rummaged through the Warblers' Rule Book for some kind of precedent. Kurt raised his eyebrows significantly at Blaine again.

"Fellow Warblers!" Blaine shouted, bringing at least half the assembled boys to a halt. "May I remind you that depending on the sound quality of our microphones and speakers, and the time delay of our respective Internet connections, we run the risk of picking up bad habits by overcompensating for our technology in any Skype conferencing we do," he said. "I propose we take the time to rest ourselves and our voices, and come together for extended practices the week before Regionals refreshed and ready to compete."

"Perhaps a compromise," David suggested over the ensuing hubub. "Warblers can be trusted to practice independently during Spring Break, and we extend our rehearsal schedule both this week and the week before Regionals to compensate."

"All in favor?" Wes asked, gavel at the ready. This time, Kurt's hand did go up--it was as close to a sane plan as he expected here, and probably the best chance they had of compensating for Coach Sylvester's plotting. He wouldn't be surprised if select members of Aural Intensity suddenly found themselves put on the No-Fly list just in time to miss their own Spring Break family vacations. He had no intention of sharing that bit of paranoia with the Council, though, or Wes would probably find a way to do the same thing.

"Very well," Wes said, tallying across the sea of raised hands. "Warblers will practice independently no less than two hours a day throughout the duration of Spring Break. Singers within the same geographical region are highly encouraged to meet up and practice together. Emergency rehearsal schedule will go into effect no later than the Sunday of our return." He banged his gavel. "Now. On to the question of appropriate competition footwear."

 

 

Kurt couldn't help but be glad of the coming reprieve in the week leading up to break. Besides emergency rehearsals and more last-minute homework than he really thought one person should be asked to fit into a day, there was Blaine. And everything having to do with Blaine.

He found Kurt studying in the same practice room when they'd first dueted, three and a half months ago, the first in a series of misinterpreted gestures that eventually landed them here. This time, Kurt looked up before Blaine could make any lame jokes about it.

"So, what are you doing for spring break?" Blaine asked, wandering in to lean against the piano.

"Hmm," Kurt said faux-thoughtfully. "Bonding with my father, catching up on all the latest New Directions gossip, and getting yelled at by Rachel every time I try to spend more than five minutes talking to any of my old friends for fear I'll steal what I'm sure will even then remain an as-yet nonexistent setlist for Regionals."

"Wait, how will Rachel know if you--"

"Oh, she'll know," Kurt said darkly. "She's Rachel Berry. She will _know_. What about you, any grand and exciting plans? Did Scott invite you down to Antigua along with the rest of the fifth floor?"

"Come to Cincinnati with me," Blaine said abruptly. "Just for a couple of days. I know you'd love the chance to spend some time in a city bigger than Lima, and I happen to have two tickets to see a minimally-acclaimed community theater production of _The Fantasticks_ next Thursday night. If I try to make my sister go with me, she's going to get a call about a mysterious emergency paperwork disaster three hours before showtime and spend the rest of the night hiding in her office with takeout and Youtube." Kurt could not begin to list the number of things in that invitation making him gape. "She's...not a live theater fan," Blaine offered apologetically, which didn't really scratch the surface on underlying issues there.

"Blaine..." Kurt started. Then he stopped, rethought his plan of attack, and went on. "What did you say to my father?" he asked instead.

"What?" Blaine asked, obviously confused.

"After that day in my room the other weekend. I know you went to talk to him, he just wouldn't tell me what you said. So what was it?" Kurt folded his hands carefully over his homework and looked across the table with implacable calmness.

"I..I told him the truth," Blaine said.

"Which was?" Kurt asked. Blaine sighed.

"Do you know what Mathilda did, after I told her I was gay?" he asked. Kurt cocked his head and waited for him to go on. "She tossed a box of condoms and a bottle of... _stuff_ on my bed, and told me, quote, “Don't be stupid.” That was it. I know she cares about me and everything, but we...we're not _like_ you and your dad," Blaine said in frustration. "And it works for us, I got by fine, but I just...I thought it might be nice if you didn't have to." He smiled, a little, wryly. "Your dad already told me how much I was overstepping."

"Right," said Kurt. "I'm sure those were exactly the words he used."

The problem was this: Blaine Anderson was never going to change. The shine had been coming off more and more lately, wearing away the dapper Prince Charming until only the oblivious, surprisingly angry boy underneath showed through. Kurt had to admit there was a little bit of a thrill in it. He had a mental catalog of all the times he was pretty sure Blaine's smiles were accidental or inspired by real happiness instead of put on for a crowd. It was progress, of a sort.

It just wasn't the kind of progress that would ever lead to Blaine _not_ treating Kurt like they were just on the edge of Something More, only to pull back whenever Kurt tried to go there. He was never going to get it. And it was time that Kurt either learned to accept that, or resigned himself to turning into a sad copy of Rachel Berry, any one of the times she hadn't been dating Finn.

"So, what do you say?" Blaine asked, puppy-dog smile back in force. "Be my Spring Break practice buddy?"

"Let's see, an entertainingly bad production of a classic musical, or another night spent getting sideways paranoid glances from Finn over dinner before he and my dad take over the living room to bond over college basketball," Kurt said. "I think I can squeeze some time in Cincinnati out of my busy schedule."

"Great!" Blaine grinned. "You'd actually be doing me a huge favor by coming down for a visit. If I spend longer than a day or two hanging around the apartment by myself, 'Tilda's going to sell me to the first indie coffeehouse that's looking for a singer just to get some peace and quiet."

"Well we can't have that," Kurt said. "Once you got past the Top 40 they'd never properly appreciate your repertoire of runaway eighties pop hits and 1920's classics. I'm in."

"I'm glad," said Blaine, and oh, Kurt had another incidence to add to his 'real smiles' list. It wasn't fair, wasn't fair at all. "Hey, so, since your parents and my sister are all BFF now, do you think we could talk your dad into letting you stay overnight? I can't promise any better than the couch," he warned, "but you could actually spend some time in a city. It's not exactly New York..."

"It's Cincinnati, Blaine. You've got an obsession with strange chili and fewer people in your greater metropolitan area than _Wichita_ ,” Kurt pointed out.

“I actually don't like the chili,” said Blaine. “But it's bigger than Lima. Come on. We could go shopping, or go to the zoo or something.”

“We could,” said Kurt, who hadn't wanted to go to a zoo since he was about seven years old. “I'll ask my dad.”

Maybe there was something to this 'parents who liked each other' thing, after all.

 

 

His dad, of course, spent seven and a half minutes on the phone with Mathilda confirming plans, and the next fifty-two minutes engaging in a lively debate over just how much Bear Grylls and his TV crew were faking the whole thing. They did not approach anything involving early teenage crushes, adorable embarrassing childhood memories, or any other such topics, but Kurt didn't trust it yet.

He set Pavarotti up in Carole's capable care, since he wouldn't trust Finn to take care of a goldfish, and drove down to Cincinnati on Tuesday afternoon. It was a warm day for spring, especially the spring they'd been having, although he'd be able to get away with daily use of his extensive scarf collection for at least a little while longer.

Their tickets were for Wednesday night, but given Rachel's strict moratorium on 'fraternizing with the competition', Kurt didn't really have any pressing reasons to go home before late Thursday or even Friday morning. That left them more than two days of each other, less time than a week at school but all of it alone together, nothing to interrupt but Mathilda or the occasional shop clerk. Kurt hoped he'd be able to survive it with some few remaining pieces of his dignity intact.

He needed to be done with this sad, useless crush, just like he'd gotten over Finn—and that had turned out even better than Kurt had ever actually hoped, hadn't it? Finn was a much better brother than he ever would have made a boyfriend, when he could remember that Kurt actually did still live in the same house two nights a week. Blaine would probably be the same, once Kurt managed to drive all the wanting to see him as boyfriend material right out of his own head. He was a good friend—well, mostly, when he wasn't doing things like comparing them to Harry and Sally or demanding Kurt learn to make sexy faces or sending every mixed signal on the planet. They wouldn't _be_ mixed signals once Kurt learned to stop reading them that way.

If it had somehow escaped Kurt's notice that he'd never actually _been_ to Blaine's apartment before, he definitely would have remembered by the second or third time the GPS directions tried to take him through a CVS parking lot. Eventually he just gave in and called.

Blaine laughed when he named the intersection he'd been through three times in the past five minutes. “Okay, you're literally four blocks away. Just get on Clifton going north and I'll talk you through it.”

“Thank you,” Kurt said, settling his phone in the crook of his shoulder so he could keep an eye out for poorly-marked streets. “So what do we have on the agenda for this week? You've been secretive.”

“Well, I thought since we've got three days, I could show you around the neighborhood today, then touristy stuff tomorrow and shopping on Thursday?” Blaine suggested. “Oh, and turn left at the next light.”

“Got it.” Kurt settled smoothly into the turning lane, then added, “You know, with a promise like that, I might just have no choice but to stay through 'til Friday.”

“I'm sort of counting on it,” Blaine chuckled in his ear, warm as cashmere, making Kurt's stomach twist sour. “Okay, keep your eyes open to the right, it's the big apartment complex, you can't miss it.”

Blaine and Mathilda lived three stories up, down a carpeted hall that smelled very faintly of mold and a little like someone was making beef stew. He was waiting for Kurt at the door, like he was just barely too close to this edge of 'polite' to actually be impatient. When he saw Kurt, his whole face lit up; the sour clenching in Kurt's stomach sprouted butterflies and got a thousand times worse. Kurt stomped on them. Hard. With a metaphorical steel-toed boot.

“Come on in, drop your stuff,” Blaine ushered him through the doorway. “It's not exactly much, but neither of us are really ever here, so it doesn't really matter.”

Kurt's first impression was 'small'. It wasn't fair, exactly, not once he'd gotten a good look past the entryway and out through the living room to the balcony. Blaine led the way in, directing Kurt to toss his overnight bag on the floor next to the big plush gray couch.

“So, is there a grand tour?” he asked, glancing around. “Or at least a coat rack?”

“Oh! Right, here, we have a closet, let me--” Blaine offered immediately, and Kurt shrugged off his blue peacoat to hand it over. It gave him a chance to look around a little more thoroughly. There was a wire entertainment center stuffed with DVDs, a slightly battered square coffee table, a small dining table and four chairs around an L-bend in the room... “There's not much of a tour to give, but the bathroom's over there, and here, I can show you the kitchen...”

It was a short tour, but enough to make Kurt completely revise his opinion. Between eight years alone with his father, and then three full months of helping to pack up Finn and Carole's entire lives, Kurt felt he was something of an expert on two-person living. The Anderson apartment probably had at least as much square footage as the Hudson house, if you didn't count the basement. It was just _empty_.

The big gray couch was almost large enough to disguise the fact that there were only three pieces of furniture in the entire living room. There were no dishes drying next to the sink, no books or magazines or half-finished crossword puzzles left out on the coffee table. The coat rack was missing, but so was any kind of place to put shoes, or keys, or mail. No houseplants, no ceramic pots that had once held long-dead houseplants, no silk houseplants, no pictures of Blaine's aunt, or uncle, or parents. Not that Blaine had any pictures of them at school, but still, Kurt had somehow assumed that in his actual home...

Blaine's room was pale blue, not landlord-standard-white like the rest of the apartment, and at least there were actual belongings in here. There were two stacks records piled under the windows, a record player plugged in next to them, three different guitar cases leaning against the wall, and Blaine's laptop, lid closed and glowing, sitting on top of his neatly-made bed. Kurt approved. Well, mostly.

“Really?” he asked, raising his eyebrows at the dotted red-and-yellow lampshade. “Primary colors, Blaine?”

Blaine flushed and looked down. “It was an early attempt at accent colors,” he said. “I don't know if you've noticed, but this place isn't exactly the most lived-in, so I haven't gotten around to changing it. Mathilda helped me pick it out.”

“Oh,” Kurt said, and wondered why Blaine hadn't just said so to begin with. “Well, never mind me, then.” Family was different. He still had those ridiculous red suspenders his dad had given him as some kind of attempt to bond when he was fifteen. Granted, he'd only worn them three or four times, but...he could probably pull them out of the closet again and try to build an outfit around them. God only knew how his father had managed to find such a _completely unmatchable_ shade of red, but as an accent piece they had potential.

“No, you're right,” Blaine said, now looking at the lamp and still avoiding Kurt's eyes. “It's pretty old anyway. Help me pick out a new one this week?”

“Are you sure?” Kurt asked, thinking about mixed signals and Morocco. “I wouldn't want to hurt your sister's feelings.”

“I can promise you, she won't mind.” Blaine finally looked up from the lamp with a smile. “Trust me, 'Tilda knows exactly where her strengths and weaknesses lie, and shopping—not a big strength.”

“What time is she getting home, anyway?” Kurt asked. “If we're going to be home for dinner, we'd better get moving.”

“She left a note she'd be late at the office, actually,” Blaine said. “She left some cash, though. I'm supposed to take you out, show you a good time in Cincinnati.”

Blaine got all his lines from movies, Kurt reminded himself. Kurt had watched most of the movies with him.

“That would be nice,” he said, folding his hands carefully behind his back to stop them fidgeting or clenching or anything else they might want to do. “Should we get going?”

 

 

Blaine's neighborhood was in walking distance from the University of Cincinnati main campus, not too far from a few streets line with quaint old buildings housing little indie boutiques and interesting-looking restaurants. It wasn't New York, but it wasn't really anything like Lima, either. Blaine caught him staring in fascination at some kind of avant-garde window display involving two mannequins and something that should never be done with Chantilly lace, or possibly was brilliant.

“Come on,” he said, grabbing Kurt by the hand without any more hesitance or fear than he would have shown at Dalton. “My favorite record store's just up here.”

They spent more than half an hour sorting through the bins before they finally got kicked out for singing track selections to each other every time they found another album only one of them knew by heart. Blaine's ignorance with regards to the great divas of the 1970's was really quite distressing.

They finally stopped for dinner at an Indian restaurant, for all Kurt tried to protest that the thick gravies would go right to his waist. It was spicer than he'd expected, and Blaine laughed as he gulped at his water glass, then gulped down more rice, to try to kill the burn. The closest thing Lima had to Indian food was the yellow curry at the Chinese takeout place on 17th.

It was perfect, or as close to it as anyone could reasonably expect to get, this many miles from an actual major metropolitan center. They found themselves back at the apartment a little before nine, tired in the happiest sense, wrestling bags full of Kurt's new drastic-markdown-for-slight-imperfections boots, and three new scarves, and the two records Blaine later snuck back into the shop to buy.

Mathilda was in already, tapping her pen against a mountain of paperwork at the dining table in time with the beat of the techno blaring out of the stereo speakers. She looked up when Blaine turned the volume down and waved at them distractedly.

“Have a good day out?” she asked.

“Yeah, we went up to Northside, wandered around.” Blaine held up his bag with one of his most winning smiles. “Got some new records.”

Mathilda groaned and covered her eyes with one hand. “If it's fast, kid. Right now the electric keyboard is just about the only thing keeping me from falling asleep on top of these.”

Blaine shot a glance at Kurt, who widened his eyes in what he hoped was an accommodating manner. He wasn't sure what Blaine saw there, but the next thing he said was,

“I think we're going up to the roof, actually. We'll stay out of your hair.”

“Okay.” Mathilda yawned. “Leave the college kids alone if they're up there getting drunk again, don't fall off the edge. I'll be here discovering just how many ways a junior agent can find to misspell 'infraction'. Coffee when you come down if you want some.”

It was a relatively nice night for late March in Ohio, cold enough to be glad of coats and fingerless gloves but nothing that should be too hard to sit out in for an hour or so. Kurt followed Blaine out without comment, up to the fourth floor, and through a door with a broken lock to find a rickety-looking ladder. Every time he nearly opened his mouth to ask a question, Kurt closed it again. What would he even say?

There was one harshly white light bulb by the top of the ladder, but most of the roof was just-barely illuminated by the hazy glow of city lights reflecting off the clouds. It was covered in gravel and strewn with empty beer cans, presumably left by the college kids Mathilda was talking about, surrounded by a low wall about two feet high. Blaine sighed and settled down against it, staring off into the sky. Kurt could only sit a little more gingerly beside him.

“So,” he said. Blaine didn't seem down, just suddenly quiet. “Come here often?” It really was a pretty view.

“Yeah, actually, during summer break,” Blaine said, apparently missing Kurt's reference entirely. “At least, when the college kids aren't up here. That lock's been broken at least since we moved in.”

“Attentive landlord,” Kurt mused, and Blaine smiled.

“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, it's been a while.”

“You were fourteen, right?” Kurt asked curiously. Blaine never talked about his family, beyond what everyone at Dalton knew, but being here had to at least open the door for questions. “When you and Mathilda moved here.”

“Just about fifteen, actually,” Blaine said. “A few weeks before my fifteenth birthday. The cutoff dates for the school year in Rhode Island were weird.”

“That must have been hard, leaving everybody behind just in time for high school,” Kurt said. Blaine shrugged stiffly, looking out over the rooftops again.

“Blaine?” Kurt tried again. “What were your aunt and uncle like?”

“They...” Blaine said, and then closed his mouth again, eyes somewhere distant past the clouds. “Detached,” he said finally. “We weren't...close, my family, not really. They never...they weren't like your dad,” he said. “Even more than 'Tilda, they really...”

“I'm sorry,” said Kurt, and Blaine flashed him another of his quick, well-prepared smiles.

“It wasn't all bad,” he said. “They taught me some things. I learned to cook when I was seven or eight.”

“So did I,” said Kurt. By the time he was eight, there'd been nobody else left in the house capable of doing it.

It was silent for a moment, or at least, the panoply of distant traffic noises went unbroken by conversation. Kurt wondered vaguely what kind of parents, or even parental stand-ins, traded their kid off to another relative so they could retire to Boca, anyway. But then, Puck's mother appeared not to notice he alternated selling drugs for Mr. Ryerson with thinly-veiled prostitution, and Rachel's dads let her out of the house dressed like _that_ , so it probably wasn't his place to say.

“What was your mother like?” Blaine asked suddenly, then drew back as Kurt turned to look at him. “You don't have to, I was just wondering. How much you remembered about her.”

“Do you remember your mom at all?” Kurt asked.

“Only from pictures,” said Blaine. “Maybe flashes, sometimes, but I don't know if they're real or I'm just--”

“Making it up,” Kurt finished. “Her dresser still smells like her perfume. We put it in the attic when we moved, but I've been opening up all the drawers just to smell it for so many years that I don't really know if I'm remembering her, or just...”

“The memory of a memory,” Blaine finished. “Yeah.” He took a deep breath, let it out slowly, hands slowly unclenching on bent knees.

“She had the softest hands,” Kurt said. “I still remember that part. Dad says she had an even better bitchface than I do when she didn't like something. She'd just sweep in and make everything right, whether you wanted her to or not.”

“My mom...” Blaine said. Then, unexpectedly, he smiled—not at Kurt, but a distant smile, for something far away. “Her name was Lily,” he said. “She had green eyes.”

They sat in silence, lost in their individual memories. The cold's been creeping in, little by little. Kurt can't help a shiver.

“Are you cold? We could go in,” Blaine offered, instantly attentive. Kurt waved him off.

“In a little bit,” he said. Personal revelations in the freezing chill or a cheery apartment full of loud noise and Mathilda grumbling over her paperwork—he'd need the warmth of the latter to keep his fingers from falling off soon enough, but there was something too right about being up here, sharing secrets in the darkness.

He hadn't talked to anybody about his mother's dresser since that day with Finn. It was probably a sign, he thought, that this felt just as safe and right and temporary as that afternoon had.

“You like it up here,” Kurt said instead, and Blaine grinned.

“Yeah, I do,” he admitted. “I don't know if I've mentioned this, but I've kind of got a thing for heights.”

“Trust me Blaine, we know,” Kurt assured him dryly. He wondered if that had come from Lily Anderson with the green eyes, if she was short like Blaine or if that had come from his still-unnamed father, if she had messy black hair like both of her children, left uncontrolled or slicked back with gel. If she liked to sing.

 

 

Which brings Kurt back to the snake.

It's a very nice snake, he guesses, if you happen to like snakes, which, up until ten minutes ago, he hadn't been aware that Blaine _did_. It's slender, and bright green, and hanging in some of those artificial branches in its cage while it waves its nice triangular head back and forth near the glass and hisses. And Blaine is hissing back.

It had been a good day, up until this point. And yes, after Blaine's tour of historic downtown Cincinnati, they'd ended up at the zoo. It wasn't too bad. It was sunny enough that they didn't freeze, cold enough to keep most of the crowds away, and most of the animals are indoors anyway. The birds had been nice, over on the other end of the zoo. Blaine had pointed one out, sitting on a branch and preening fastidiously, almost the exact same color as Kurt's red scarf today. Kurt could relate.

And then they ended up at the reptile house. Where Blaine appears completely unaware that he's having a full conversation with an Asian vine snake, entirely in hisses.

“Um. Blaine,” Kurt prods. “Who's your friend?”

Blaine glances over at him in confusion. “What do you mean?”

“You seem pretty intent on that snake there,” Kurt points out. “I was just wondering if you were planning to introduce us.” All right, maybe he lets a little bit of snap into the end of it there. Blaine just looks confused.

“No, I was just saying, check out how he blends in with the leaves and stuff back there,” he says, nodding to the back of the cage. Kurt just watches him blandly.

“Riiight,” he says. “Well, since I don't speak snake--” but he cuts off mid-sentence, because every muscle in Blaine's face has gone completely rigid.

“Right,” says Blaine. “Speak snake. Who would do that?”

Kurt keeps eye contact with him several moments longer, being sure to level the full weight of his judgment in his gaze, then waves Blaine off with one hand. “Go ahead, hiss at your new little friend. I'll be over looking at the turtles when you're ready to go find the monkey house.” Turtles at least, to the best of Kurt's knowledge, don't hiss.

Blaine does, though, like a tentative experiment, one or two times in a row just before Kurt's out of earshot. Kurt rolls his eyes. There. If Blaine isn't completely disqualified from potential boyfriend-hood by _now,_ Kurt really doesn't know what he can do.

 

 

The play is low-budget, but surprisingly good. Blaine seems distracted, lost in his own head, but somewhere around the intermission concessions run he pulls himself together. Good. Kurt isn't one to talk during a performance, but he needs some kind of receptive audience once the show's finished and he can release all the witty one-liners he's been saving up.

He uses them all on the ride back to the apartment, and Blaine laughs in all the appropriate places, but his smile seems even more put-on than usual. Whatever he's working out in his head, Kurt hopes he comes to some kind of conclusion quickly.

Mathilda's still up when they get back, sprawled out along the couch that's Kurt's bed, watching something involving Matt Damon and large amounts of cash.

“How was the show, boys?” she asks lazily.

“It was good. What's on?” Blaine asks, neatly lining coats and shoes up in the front closet.

“Third Bourne movie. Liars, guns, and amnesia,” she says enticingly. Kurt doesn't even have to glance at Blaine's face to know what his expression must look like.

“I'm fine either way,” he says anyway, because some kinds of family time are worth sitting through action movies, or Discovery-channel survivalist specials, or football games. Blaine straightens up from the closet a little too slowly, closes the door behind him.

“Think we're going to pass,” he said. “We'll keep the music down.”

“Suit yourself, kid,” Mathilda waves them off.

So Kurt finds himself sprawled across Blaine's bed on his stomach, humming along absently to the score from _Pirates of Penzance_ and sharing the most recent issue of _Vogue_. Blaine isn't quite touching him down most of the length of their bodies, but their knees knock together every time one or the other of them moves. Kurt would pull away, if. If it wouldn't be completely, painfully obvious. If it wouldn't jolt the bed and leave Blaine rolling even farther into him. If he didn't still want--

The walls are paper-thin, but Mathilda turns the TV down and they keep the record player on low. He's just about to make a comment about the really _unfortunate_ things the new summer-trend peach tones are doing to that model's complexion when the sound from the television cuts out completely. Mathilda's voice, clearly audible over the Act II libretto, slices through the apartment like a knife. "Oh, _fuck_."

Kurt's head shoots up, a moment behind Blaine's. He's about to go to the door and ask what's wrong when she continues all on her own. "Can't Murgatroyd handle it? Yes, I realize that. I'm not _shirking_ , Julius, I'm _on assignment_ ," she hisses. He hadn't noticed her phone ring, but he had been a little busy debating the merits of the return of the macramé look with Blaine. "You know that's fucking classified, just like it is every--Project Frodo. Yes I know you don't know what that is, that's what classified means, Julius." The only appropriate thing to do, obviously, is to stare very hard at the display of sundresses and pretend the walls of Blaine's apartment are remotely useful as a noise buffer. Kurt's fairly sure anything involving the word 'classified' is way, way beyond what he's cleared to know.

Blaine's head is still perked up, listening, like a dog waiting for some signal to pounce. It's not Kurt's place to pull him down any more than he ought to be listening to this phone call. That doesn't mean he _doesn't_ hear when Mathilda goes quiet. When she speaks again, her whole tone is different. "How many pieces? Jesusfuck, Julius. Any survivors?"

Kurt swallows hard. It's one thing to know that Blaine's sister has the kind of job they make terrible action-adventure TV shows about, "but with way more paperwork, seriously, Kurt, you should _hear_ how she complains about the paperwork." It's another thing to realize that she's the sort of person who talks about situations best described using the words _survivors_ and _pieces_ in a tone like an employee describing a particularly heinous cleanup in aisle five. Kurt is suddenly, fiercely grateful for his father's quiet, boring job. Blaine is studying the magazine like the summer's newest trends in stripes hold the secrets of the universe.

"Well, don't let Olga at them until I get there. Yes. Yes, I--no, it's fine, _absolutely not_. I'll see you in half an hour." Then she stops talking again, but it's the purposeful silence of someone who's just hung up the phone, not the expectant quiet of listening to the other side of a conversation. Kurt keeps his head down and his mouth shut. Mabel's sweet soprano urges the local constabulary on to their death against the pirates. Why had they picked this operetta again?

“I know you heard every word of that,” Mathilda's voice says, suddenly right outside the door. She swings it open without further invitation.

"So I need to go in, and I don't know when I'll make it back," she says. "Some psycho...well, never mind. Blaine, where's the keys?"

Blaine's on his feet in an instant, rummaging through their bags for the day; Kurt takes a little longer, mind spinning between _oh god somebody is probably actually dead somewhere_ and _she's leaving us alone in the apartment for the night_ with a little brush past _why does she need his car keys, doesn't she have her own?_

"Is there anything we can do?" he hears himself saying, and is terrified to realize that he actually means it. Not that he knows what kind of help he could be in a murder investigation--worse than murder, if _pieces_ and _survivors_ are the questions at hand--okay, now he feels a little queasy. He has really got to stop letting Finn control the remote for extended _Law and Order: SVU_ marathons just because he thinks the female cop is hot.

Mathilda raises one unfortunately bushy eyebrow and fixes him with a steel-eyed look to rival Coach Sylvester's. "This is my job, kid," she says. "No big deal. You help by proving your dad right when he agreed to trust me with you tonight and not getting yourselves into trouble while I'm out." Blaine tosses a set of keys to her and she snatches them out of midair, tucks them into the pocket of the jacket she already has on. "Blaine knows the rules. Stay in the apartment until tomorrow morning, I'll call you if I'm not home by nine. No drinking, no rampant stupidity, no inviting the college boys from 312 for wild orgies. All right?"

"That seems doable," Kurt says quietly.

"Good luck," says Blaine. Mathilda just throws them both a wave as she heads out for the door.

"Well," says Blaine. "At least she didn't leave twenty bucks for tomorrow night's pizza." Kurt stares at him like he's just declared his undying apathy for all things Gaga.

"I'm sorry, I'm having trouble comprehending the fact that your sister is running off in the middle of the night to tend to a situation described only using the words 'survivors' and 'pieces', yet your biggest worry is tomorrow night's pizza," he says. Blaine smiles wryly and sinks back down on the bed.

"It means she thinks she'll be home sometime tomorrow," he explains. "Don't worry so much. This happens sometimes. She tries not to take calls while I'm home on break, but sometimes..." Blaine shrugs. “I didn't hear her take the spare gun out of the coat closet, so it's probably safe."

"Really? _That's_ your standard?" Kurt turns himself around to sit upright on the bed, folding his legs so he can look at Blaine face-on. Blaine doesn't seem at all bothered, which doesn't mesh at all with their relationship as Kurt understands it. "I don't understand, why aren't you beside yourself with worry? If it were my dad--or even Finn or Carole--"

"Kurt, she's a cop," says Blaine. "This is her job. She's good at it. And no offense to your brother, but I think she's probably a little better equipped to handle it."

"Yes, the closest Finn ever has or will get to a firefight is Halo night with Puckerman, and I think we're all grateful for that." Kurt dismisses his stepbrother with the wave of a hand. "Still, given everything you've told me about your family, I thought you two were close."

Blaine shifts uncomfortably and leans down to pick up the abandoned issue of _Vogue_. "We're not that close."

Kurt watches him, but Blaine refuses to meet his eyes. More family secrets, then. Kurt doesn't really understand how siblings work anyway, or how older sisters compare to relatives who'd rather move to Florida, and it's not his business anyway.

So Kurt just says, "Hmm, her loss," and scoots up to lean against the headboard, patting the space beside him. "Flip back to page 47, I want to look at the monstrosity of a hairstyle they put on that poor model again."

Blaine settles in next to him obediently and Kurt keeps himself a full centimeter away, impenetrable gap between his left thigh and Blaine's right one. He reaches out to flip a page, and Blaine's fingers brush against his, just lightly enough that it might be an accident. It tingles, a little, and something in Kurt relaxes just a fraction. Just enough to let his leg settle closer by that half an inch.

"Do you want come coffee?" Blaine asks, standing up abruptly. "'Tilda was running the coffeemaker earlier, I should make sure it isn't still on."

"Um...yes, sure." Kurt tries not to let himself look too disappointed. Not that it matters; Blaine's up off the bed and out the bedroom door before the words have even finished leaving his mouth. Right. Perfect.

He fucked it up again. It never fails, does it? Kurt meets boy, Kurt terrifies boy away. Only now it's not just well-intentioned but mildly homophobic straight boys who, he can tell himself, just can't handle the obviously worldview-destroying possibility that another guy just might find them attractive. No, this time it's a guy who's actively into Ewan McGregor, penises, and 50% Gap discounts. Which means it has nothing to do with sex and everything to do with _Kurt_. Fabulous.

He accepts now, from the lofty vantage point of one more year of age and experience, that full Moroccan-inspired room makeovers are probably pushing things a little too far, but sitting too close to share a magazine? With the boy who nearly sat on top of him during the 'Baby, It's Cold Outside' duet? Of course, that was before Blaine found out about his clearly impossible and unreciprocated crush, and responded by demonstrating his willingness to date a _girl_ before he would look twice at Kurt.

And then insisted Kurt meet his family. And invited him to stay for three days over spring break. And then fled for the shelter of the kitchen as soon as his sister was gone. Kurt can be excused for thinking that the mixed signals aren't entirely in his head, right?

Well, the leaping up and running away was fairly unambiguous. Kurt checks his watch and sighs. It was an early show, it's barely 10:30; if he leaves now, he can probably get back to Lima not too long after midnight. He'll think of something to tell his dad and Carole on the way.

First he should probably think of something to tell Blaine. They're trying to be friends, right? And friends make excuses when they run off in the middle of the night beyond 'this was a terrible idea to begin with'.

Blaine is leaning against the kitchen counter, head tilted back against the cabinets with his eyes closed; he doesn't look up when Kurt stops in the doorway. "Hey," he says, and Blaine jumps, nearly banging his head. Kurt winces. "I should probably just go home, actually," he says. "It's not that far back to Lima, and you've driven it later than this plenty of times. If I start now, my car probably won't even turn into a pumpkin in the middle of the highway." He smiles at the joke, then feels it slowly die as Blaine doesn't smile back. Right. So it's like that, then.

"Okay," he says. "So I'm just gonna--"

"Don't go," Blaine says, stepping forward at the last possible second as Kurt turns in the doorway. His arm reaches out, like he's about to try and catch Kurt's wrist, but then he stops short and lets it fall to his side again. "Please. Don't."

"Are you sure?" Kurt asks guardedly. "Because my car's right downstairs, it's not that big of a deal if..." If Blaine would be more comfortable here without him, he doesn't say. Blaine—smiles at him, a little, but it's small and tight and full of things Kurt guesses he isn't supposed to be able to figure out.

"Let's go up on the roof," Blaine says out of nowhere. "I could use some air.”

 

 

It's warmer than last night, less windy and clearer, but still not enough to see stars past the ambient glare of the city. Blaine relaxes almost as soon as they hit the open air. He's still distant, distracted, but not as tense with it, at least.

“So,” Kurt prompts, settling down in the same spot as yesterday. “What did you want to talk about?” There's not a lot else to do up here, after all. Usually they can talk for hours.

“Doesn't matter,” says Blaine. He's fiddling with something up his sleeve, has been since they got their shoes and coats back out of the closet to come up here. Kurt eyes it, reaching over to make sure--

“Is that a magic wand?” he asks incredulously. Blaine looks up with a sheepish, little-boy smile.

“Yeah,” he admits. “When I was a kid, I was into all that. I guess talking about our families last night just got me remembering.”

“Why Blaine Warbler,” Kurt says, surprise and amusement lifting his spirits and the corners of his mouth. “Did you do _magic_ as a kid?”

Blaine raises his shoulders, obviously embarrassed, but openly smiling now even as he ducks his head. “Oh yeah,” he says. “Rabbits out of hats and everything.”

“Did you do card tricks?” Kurt asks. “Dare I ask if you remember any?”

“There were some cards,” Blaine admits. “Mostly it was all about the wands, though.” Before Kurt can say any more, Blaine leans over and presses the carved handle of the stick into his hand. “There, see? Just a toy.”

“So it is,” Kurt says, waving it a little. It's actual wood, not plastic, pale and polished smooth, just a little warm from the heat of Blaine's hand. “What do I do with it now, point it over there and say 'Abracadabra'?” He waves the wand in the direction of a stray pile of gravel.

Blaine flinches, hard and reflexively. “Oh, what,” Kurt asks. “Too cliché?” He should introduce Blaine to Sam, they could talk about Lord of the Rings and wizards and dragons together. And then Blaine could introduce Sam to his own repressed-but-for-his-hairstyle homosexual leanings, and they could live happily ever after with a whole brood of adopted children brought up on the Chronicles of Narnia... “All right, what do _you_ say, Mr. Magic-Man?”

“Well, there is one spell,” Blaine says, leaning over to correct Kurt's grip on the wand. “ _Wingardium Leviosa_. It was supposed to make things levitate.”

“Hmm, _right_ ,” Kurt says, but obediently lifts the wand and waves it towards some other part of the roof. “Wingardium Leviosa.”

Blaine is laughing at him, shaking with it, and well, fine. It's better than thinking about who played these games with him when he was a child, his 'distant' aunt and uncle or the sister who's out even now facing god-knows-what. Better than dwelling on earlier. “It seems to be broken,” Kurt says.

“No, no, here, stand up, you've got to _swish_ and _flick_ ,” Blaine insists, scrambling to his own feet and demonstrating with a wave of his empty hand. “ _Swish_ and _flick_.”

Kurt's eyebrows have to be somewhere around his hairline. “You have got to be kidding me,” he says. “And to think people assume you're the _less_ outwardly gay of us.”

“Oh, come on,” Blaine laughs, taking the wand from Kurt's unresisting hand and pulling Kurt along with it. “Like this. _Wingardium Leviosa_.” He says it with great pomp and a broad sweeping motion that, Kurt has to admit, is very much a swish. He looks exactly as ridiculous as Kurt expected.

“You really are secretly a dork, aren't you?” Kurt asks fondly. Something moves out of the corner of his eye, and he glances over reflexively.

“Blaine?” Kurt asks, suddenly no longer laughing. “Why is that empty beer can floating over there?”

“What?” Blaine asks, and turns to look. All in an instant, he goes dead still, face ghost-white in the moonlight. The can falls abruptly out of the air with a clatter.

“So, either you spent way too much time up here preparing for a seriously overly-complicated prank, or I've lost my mind,” Kurt says after a few moments.

“It was nothing,” Blaine says. “The wind, must be, it tosses those cans around all the time, let's just--”

“Blaine,” says Kurt, and Blaine stops to look at him.

It's dark on the roof, shadowy and hard to make out expressions, but Blaine doesn't look like he's joking. He doesn't look like anything Kurt's ever seen on him before, except maybe a little hopeful around the eyes. Mostly, he looks like the face Kurt remembers seeing in the mirror before school every morning in freshman year, on the days he'd managed to actually convince himself something good _might_ happen. He looks terrified.

“It's nothing,” Blaine repeats. “It must be.”

“Show me,” says Kurt, still not sure what he's asking. Blaine acquiesces anyway. He turns, shaky-handed, points his wand at a different corner of the roof, and says,

“ _Accio_ can,” like it means something great and terrible, or at least intelligible.

Then another crushed-up empty comes zooming at them like a self-propelled missile. Kurt barely remembers the reflexes to catch it before it hits Blaine in the face. Blaine is frozen still.

“Definitely lost my mind,” Kurt says matter-of-factly. If he tries, he can actually feel pieces of his brain coming unhinged. There are no wires on the can.

“That's not supposed to happen,” Blaine says blankly. “It's not supposed to do _anything_ , it's not supposed to work, not now—” and something in his phrasing makes Kurt look up sharply from the impossible PBR can in his hands and frown.

“Then how did you know how to do it?” he asks. “You're really not reacting with the same kind of world-rending disbelief as I am here, are you.”

“No,” says Blaine. “No, I'm really not.”

“Then what--” Kurt starts, but Blaine's bursting into action again, whirling to put his hands on Kurt's shoulders, bright-eyed, intense.

“I wanted to tell you,” he says. “I wanted to tell you everything, but I didn't know how, and I couldn't even if I did, but...ask me anything.”

“Are you on crack?” Kurt asks obediently, raising his eyebrows, Blaine just shaking his head and barreling right on.

“Ask me to show you anything so you believe me.”

“Michelle Bachmann in Lady Gaga's meat dress,” Kurt pulls out of thin air. “What? Like anything but magic could accomplish that.”

“That's not...” Blaine shakes his head, looks down towards their feet. “That's not how it works, so much. Maybe for somebody who hasn't been living in _Ohio_ for three years, but not for me.”

“What, then?” Kurt asks. “You're talking magic. _Actual_ magic. What can you do that can't be faked with slight-of-hand and wires?”

“I...” and then, inexplicably, Blaine is _laughing_ , shaking his head and laughing the kind of laughter that bubbles out after two all-nighters and a major end-of-year clearance sale and has nothing to do with being amused at all. “I don't even _remember_ , Kurt. I mean, there's three spells that you wouldn't be saying anything about wires afterwards, but you'd also never speak to me again, and--”

“Oookay, let's not try those, then,” Kurt says. He delicately takes Blaine's hands from his shoulders and guides him down. “Let's just sit down away from the forty-foot drop, okay?”

“No,” says Blaine, but apparently he's not referring to the siting down so Kurt's really not that worried about it right now. “No, never.” He takes some deep, gulping breaths, settling himself, back towards the pressed-and-gelled Blaine Anderson Kurt used to think he knows.

“So. No meat dress?” Kurt asks him once it seems like he's calmed down. Blaine shakes his head, then bends down and picks up a largish chunk of the gravel they're sitting on.

“Here. Hold out your hand,” he instructs, and grabs for it when Kurt hesitates. Now Kurt is holding a piece of gravel. While a possible madman points a can-levitating stick at it. Maybe it's a gravel-levitating stick, too. This really isn't how Kurt expected this evening to go.

“ _Engorgio_ ,” says Blaine, and the pebble in Kurt's palm suddenly swells in size. It's heavier, too. Science at McKinley was sort of a joke, and this year it's mostly been biology, but he's pretty sure that breaks a law of physics of some kind.

“Okay,” Kurt admits. “Impressive, but--”

“No, wait,” says Blaine. He positions the wand pointing at the pebble—Kurt supposes it's a rock, now—and stares down its length intently. “ _Batrachifors_ ,” he says.

It's not instantaneous, and Kurt has enough time to wonder what's supposed to happen but not to open his mouth to ask about it, before the rock in his palm _wiggles_.

There is _really_ not enough light up here for this, but almost as soon as Kurt thinks it, Blaine holds the wand upright and murmurs, “ _Lumos_ ,” and the tip of it starts giving off a soft white glow. Kurt's going to have to check him for mind-reading, too, now. He really hopes Blaine hasn't been reading his mind. It's enough to distract him from what's going on in his hand.

The rock, and there's no other word for it, is _uncurling_ like something's been all wrapped up inside and is just now waking up. In Kurt's palm. There's a shifting, and a dragging of something much too skin-smooth to be rock, and oh sweet Mama Monster that's an _eye_ blinking up at him. Bulging out of a broad, rounded head.

“Brrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrt,” croaks the toad, attempting to waddle across Kurt's hand. He's...sort of cute, Kurt guesses, as amphibians go. Frogs and snakes really must just go with the whole magic wand thing. If Blaine shows up with a cauldron or broomstick, he's out of here.

The toad lurches ineffectually forward, and that's when Kurt notices that its hind legs, perfectly frog-shaped as they are, are still made of rock. Oh. Well then. Not slight-of-hand.

“You...made a frog,” Kurt manages, staring at it.

“Yeah,” says Blaine, sounding equally as transfixed. “I didn't know I could still do that.”

“I need to sit down,” says Kurt, ignoring the cold prickle of gravel under his butt.

“I'm pretty sure you are,” says Blaine. “I promise, this can't be any weirder for you than it is for me.”

Kurt's head shoots up. “You knew,” he says. “You knew... _magic_ could work, and make rocks into frogs, and, and, who _knows_ what else.”

“I _wanted_ to tell you,” Blaine says, and he said it five minutes ago while he was still freaking out and raving like a crazy person, but this time there's so much aching _weight_ to it that it pulls some of the heat out of Kurt's building anger. Not all, but some.

“So tell me,” he says quietly. Blaine takes a deep breath.

“Okay,” he says. “Okay, so, magic is real, that's the first thing. And the second thing is that when I was a baby, this total sociopath killed my parents, and when I was about eleven he decided to come back to finish the job. Everything else is pretty much just an extension of that.”

“What,” says Kurt flatly. It's the only thing he can really think of to say.

Blaine ducks his head. At least he has the good sense to look abashed, but there's a frog partially made out of rock in Kurt's hand, so it's probably not going to be enough.

“Also, I'm British,” Blaine adds.

 

 

Mathilda is waiting for them in the living room when they get back down to the apartment.

She's leaning comfortably against the corner where the wall behind the couch turns into hallway, arms crossed, long red-brown stick dangling from between her fingers. Okay. So Blaine doesn't have the only one, then.

Blaine stops in his tracks about a step and a half into the apartment, leaving Kurt just enough room to actually close the door behind them. Probably the Andersons' neighbors don't need to hear this.

“...oh my god Blaine Anderson totally isn't your real name, is it?” Kurt realizes out loud, completely heading off whatever complicated magic-y nonsense Blaine and Mathilda were about to start saying to each other. “You've probably got some ridiculous British name, like Rupert, or, or Elton, or--”

“Harry,” says Blaine without turning his head, and Kurt nods.

“or William, or Charles, or any other member of the Royal Family for that matter.” Then his brain catches up with his ears and tongue and he stops. “Harry? Seriously? Tell me you're not actually named after the prince, that's weirdly tacky.”

“No, I'm pretty sure they just liked the name, and Kurt, maybe this isn't the time.” Blaine—or _Harry_ , and he'd better not be royalty too or Kurt really is just going to have to give up entirely—hasn't taken his eyes off his sister the whole time since they came in the front door. Her name probably isn't Mathilda, either. Who knows. Roald Dahl was English, right?

“And now he's named after robot Jesus Christ and a Muggle street magician,” Mathilda says, sweeping her eyes up and down over the pair of them. “And last I checked, he's definitely not supposed to be stealing other people's wands, trying to make them work, and flipping his whole cover for a boy with a pretty voice. Am I wrong, _Blaine_? Did the rules change while I was on my way to that crime scene I really need to be at right now?”

Blaine's hands, tucked just a little behind his back so only Kurt can see them, are clenched so tight that Kurt wonders if he's going to have nail marks in his palms. “You said,” he said, “it hadn't come back. You said if it came back, they'd come for—“

“No I didn't,” Mathilda says calmly. “Last time we talked about this, I said it hadn't come back, which it hadn't, and no wonder they hadn't come for you if it wasn't. I never promised anything about later. Nobody ever said the ability to pick up a wand and shoot off firecrackers made you _not_ a liability.”

“I had a right to know.” Blaine is trembling. Mathilda unfolds herself from the wall and walks over, step by measured step. Kurt sidles to the left, hoping to edge out of immediate critical distance.

“This is magic, kid. It's not about _rights_. It's just about what happens to you.” She twirl her wand around, a casual move that has it pointing right between Blaine's eyes before Kurt can even blink. “Congratulations, you've got power I'm not going to allow you to use to so much as warm your coffee except in highly-controlled circumstances, and you can _bet_ we're going to have a long conversation about personal property, the semantic meanings of 'stay in the apartment', and all your dear sweet inalienable rights just about as soon as I get home.”

“You're going back?” Blaine asked, and Mathilda gave him a smile that was more like a smirk.

“Seeing as how all those blasts of energy _weren't_ a horde of Death Eaters materializing to end your little life, yeah, I'm going back to do the kind of police work that's actually supposed to be taking up my time right now. But first you're going to give me a single good reason to leave _him_ ,” and suddenly her wand's moved, pointing directly at Kurt, who freezes almost as still as the hind legs as the frog still in his hand— “with a single memory of tonight intact.”

“I'm sorry, _what_?” Kurt asks, taking an involuntary step back.

“Maybe....” Blaine sounds—looks—stricken, glancing at Mathilda before focusing, too much, on Kurt. “Maybe you'd be happier if you didn't have to know any of this. Maybe it would be easier.”

“Sorry, are you telling me that not only are you a magician from Britain named Harry, you're also the kind of person who would actively try to change my memory just so I wouldn't know your secrets?” Kurt snaps. “I'd threaten to stop talking about you, but you probably wouldn't let me remember _that_ , either. Have you done this before?”

“What? No, Kurt, if I were going to change your memory just to keep you from being mad at me, don't you think I'd have made you forget that whole week with Rachel?” Kurt's glare must sharpen a _lot_ , because Blaine actually shrinks back from it a little. “Okay, not what I meant. I understand, I do, it's just...” He glances back over at Mathilda, wordlessly asking for help.

“It's dangerous, kid,” she says. “Knowing what you know? Somebody else finds out, it won't just get you hurt, it'll get him killed, and probably a lot more people than that. And if they found you, you don't want to know what kinds of things they'd do to get the information out of you.”

“They'd have to know I knew anything, first,” Kurt says stiffly.

“Kurt,” says Blaine. “It would be safer for you. It would be _so much_ safer for you, not to know.” Kurt just meets him with a level look. “If you want to...if you really want this...” And back to Mathilda. “Please.”

“I need a reason, kid, I haven't got all night,” she says, twirling her wand impatiently. “'He wants to remember' isn't going to keep the Death Eaters from pulling out the Veritaserum.”

“Only if they find him,” Blaine says. “And I...” He glances left at Kurt, then takes another step towards his sister, pleading. Kurt, for once, keeps his mouth shut. “There hasn't been _anybody_ ,” he says. “In almost three years. I haven't had anybody to talk to about any of this besides you in _years_. I just want to have _one friend_ again who actually knows my _name_.”

Mathilda sighs, brings her free hand up to massage the bridge of her nose, right between the eyes. “Of course you want to tell him your name,” she says. “Fine. I don't have time for this now anyway. I'm sealing off all the windows and doors until I get back, sit down, tell him anything you want, tomorrow morning I'll interrogate him with Veritaserum, and I'll decide how much of it he gets to keep then. Okay?”

Kurt opens his mouth to protest—what the hell is 'Veritaserum', anyway?—but Blaine steps in front of him too quickly. “Deal,” he says. “Thank you, 'Tilda.”

“Don't thank me yet,” she tells him, and raises her wand towards the ceiling. “ _Fianto Duri_ ,” she intones, moving it down in a slow circle, past the door, around across the sliding glass doors to the balcony, over behind her where the bedrooms are. Nothing glows, nothing starts flying around the room, but Kurt shivers anyway.

“All right,” says Mathilda. “Nobody but me gets in or out. You have my cell. Don't get yourselves into something where you have to use it. Clear?”

“Yes,” says Blaine instantly, and both of their eyes swing over to Kurt.

It occurs to him that the integrity of his memory might depend on not pissing Blaine's sister off like Mr. Schue in the middle of one of his weirder power trips, so he nods. “Eminently,” he agrees.

“Good. Now scoot, kid, I've got to get out the door.” She grabs her jacket up off the arm of the couch and motions Blaine out of her way with a little flick of her wand. “ _Partis Temporus_ ,” she says, and something over the door _does_ flicker, like clear cellophane that's wrinkled and caught the light, pulling open around her as she steps out of the apartment.. The door shuts behind her with a final slam. Kurt watches the shimmering as it falls back across the doorway and disappears, a little detached from however much wonder he would have felt a few hours ago.

“You'd think, with all that power, she could just teleport wherever she wants to go,” he muses, mostly sarcastically.

“I think she's got anti-Apparation spells on the apartment,” Blaine answers him anyway. “She always goes halfway across town before she tries to get anywhere. Something about not linking magic back to this place.”

“Oh,” says Kurt. “Of course she does.”

The toad in his hand ribbits.

 

They end up back in Blaine's bedroom, with the door closed even though the rest of the apartment is deserted anyway. It's like, now that they're trapped, they want to close themselves up in an even smaller area so the apartment itself won't seem so claustrophobic.

Blaine pulls _Penzance_ off the player and sets it aside, attacks one of his teetering towers of records like a man on a mission. Kurt looks around, a little lost.

“Is there someplace I can put this frog down?” he asks. Blaine turns, and Kurt recognizes the album cover even from the other side of the room. “No,” he says firmly.

“What?” Blaine asks, glancing at the record sleeve in his hand, then back over at Kurt. “You don't like _Abby Road_?”

“Please, Blaine, just not the Beatles tonight,” Kurt sighs wearily. “Meanwhile, the toad, Blaine.”

“Oh. Right. That.” Blaine scrambles to his feet, dusting his hands off on his pants, and Kurt rolls his eyes. It's a reflex, he can't begin to help it.

“Yes, Blaine, the frog you magically created out of a piece of rock just to prove you weren't crazy unless I am too.”

“Um. I can...get a bowl from the kitchen, I don't think it can hop out.” They eye it dubiously. “What's the difference between a frog and a toad anyway?” Blaine asks. Kurt stares.

“How should _I_ know, Blaine? I'm not the one who made it out of a pebble.” Then Kurt bites back against his tongue. Snapping wasn't going to accomplish anything. “I'll go find a bowl,” he says, before he can say something else.

Blaine's kitchen is laid out like no kitchen Kurt could even imagine actually working in, even besides finding the can opener sitting on a shelf next to the frying pans. There's a large glass salad bowl above the fridge, clear enough to be able to keep an eye on the frog through the sides. Kurt eyes it, considers the sanitation difficulties of sticking a live frog in a bowl somebody might eventually want to eat out of, and then contemplates holding it for the rest of the evening. Blaine can scrub it out with bleach later.

He turns out the lamp in the living room on his way back to Blaine's bedroom. Something tells him he won't be getting much sleep tonight, on the couch or anywhere else.

 _“—save you please, Mrs. Robinson, heaven holds a place for those who pray,_ ” the record player sings, and Kurt winces a little. Still, it's not _his_ mother this song reminds him of.

Top 40 doesn't really come on vinyl, he thinks, unless you special-order it, which Blaine hadn't. Everything in those stacks had an owner before either of them was even born. It's more Mr. Schuester's taste than the Warblers.

Yesterday it would have made him feel proud, chipping away another layer of the mystery that is Blaine. Right now, it just makes him feel a little sick.

Blaine is sprawled on his back on top of the covers, arm over his eyes, leaving the left side of the bed open. Kurt leaves the toad-bowl on the dresser and settles down next to him gingerly, cautiously. Blaine doesn't twitch.

“This song always makes me think of Puck,” he says conversationally. “Those three weeks I was on the football team, he used get a list of the opposing players before a game and preemptively figure out which of their mothers he'd slept with.”

Blaine doesn't move his arm, but he smiles. “I didn't know what this song was about for a good eight months after I learned to play it,” he admits. “Then 'Tilda made me watch _The Graduate_.”

“Ah.” There's the narrowest of openings there, he supposes—does 'Tilda make him watch a lot of movies, was there a reason for that one, do magicians in Great Britain even bother to watch movies—but if they're going to do this, then Kurt's apparently going to need to be direct. “So. How long have you been hiding the ability to make things fly?”

Blaine groans. “I moved here right before Freshman year,” he says. “Everything about Calhoun...that was real.” Kurt bites his lip, not sure whether to be sad or grateful. Blaine hasn't talked a lot about Calhoun, but it sounds like it was almost as bad as McKinley, minus the death threats. And it sucks that he had to go through that, but...at least he wasn't making that part up.

“I haven't been able to do...” he waves an inarticulate hand “all _that_ like you saw tonight since the spring of...whatever year that was. 2008, I guess. It seems like a long time ago.”

“So what happened?” Kurt asks quietly. The record player clicks over to the next track, _“sittin' in the railway station, got a ticket for my destination_.” He doesn't even know what home _means_ , for Blaine.

“It's a really, really long story,” Blaine sighs. Kurt just eases himself down until he's lying on his side, looking at Blaine from an infinite four inches away, close but not-too-near in the little pool of light from the bedside lamp, just the two of them alone.

“I'm kind of stuck here for the night,” Kurt says, and then winces a little at the levity, but Blaine just smiles. Finally, he rolls over onto his side, dropping his arm to look across that tiny-impassable gap. He meets Kurt's eyes, just briefly, then closes his own.

“About sixteen and a half years ago,” Blaine begins, “my parents went into hiding in a town called Godric's Hollow.”

 

They don't sleep that night, not really. Somewhere around one, or two, or three in the morning, they break for Blaine to make tea--“I spent the first fifteen years of my life in England, I can't help it,” he defends, even though Kurt didn't say anything—and somewhere around three, or four, or five they start to doze, drifting off somewhere between ' _that father's hell will slowly go by_ ' and ' _we are stardust, we are golden_ ', waking up only because the record player keeps clicking over the end of Side A.

Kurt's head is pounding, spinning with impossibilities and sleep-deprivation. The half-stone toad is still in its bowl. They draped a wet paper towel over it around midnight. Don't toads need to be kept wet? Or maybe that's only frogs, Kurt still isn't sure about the difference. He was never the kind of boy who ran around in the mud catching slimy things. Finn might know, actually. If Kurt was likely to ever actually ask that question, seeing as how he'd have to admit _why_ he needed to know how to take care of a toad...

Dawn is creeping up behind the half-closed blinds across the balcony doors in the living room. They've been talking for hours, and Kurt can't even begin to put it in order in his head. Blaine is some...fantastic kind of construct, every bit as real as Paul Varjak or C.K. Dexter Haven, only underneath the script it's not some...some boy from England who left home at 14 and ended up in America and okay, so maybe Harry-not-Blaine's biography sounds sort of suspiciously like Cary Grant's. Kurt's pretty sure pre-career Cary Grant never flew on a broomstick. Not the point.

Kurt spent a lot of time, growing up, in love with a string of characters played by Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant or Spencer Tracy. None of it ever left him feeling any warmer, when the lights went on and the VCR started to rewind, than he does right now.

Blaine—and Kurt _has_ to stop doing that, has to stop letting himself think he knows this person here at all— _Harry_ , then, pulls three eggs and a tub of whole mushrooms out of the seventies-brown refrigerator. He glances back over his shoulder, quick, like his glances have been all night, like he can't look Kurt in the eye.

“There's a green pepper in there, if you want to chop it for omelets while I do the mushrooms,” is all he says. Kurt finds half an onion, too, when he goes to look, and Bl— _Harry_ offers him a cutting board and a knife. He pulls Tilda's grounds from last night out of the coffee maker and puts on a new pot while Kurt gets to work dicing the vegetables.

“Chop the whole thing,” he says when Kurt shoots him a quick, questioning look. “When Tilda gets home, she'll want one too, and it'll keep in the fridge until then.”

“Of course,” Kurt says, and keeps his eyes on his knife.

“When she comes home,” Kurt says, knife sliding clean cuts through layers of onion, dry-eyed, “after she gets done with whatever it is she wants with me, I think I'd better go home. Either way.” With his memory or without it, he means, although if it's the latter...well, he won't really remember to worry about it.

“Yeah,” says the boy whose name is apparently Harry Potter, one-time savior of the wizarding world, and not Blaine James Anderson, Warbler. “It's been a long night.”

Kurt hesitates over the last pieces of onion. “If she...if she takes my memory,” he says, very carefully. “Can you just...”

“What?” BlaHarry asks. Kurt can feel the eyes on him, ready and attentive. What, indeed? If last night had never happened...

If he never has to know that his best friend is nothing but a lie, would he actually want to lose the friend? Kurt knows the answer ought to be 'yes', that a relationship that isn't based on truth shouldn't be worth anything to him at all, but once upon a time he'd been so, so impossibly lonely, and this is Ohio, not New York or some other place where people eat vegetables that aren't fried. It doesn't have to be real if it's enough to keep him sane and alive through graduation.

“Please don't ever try to date me,” Kurt says finally. “Or let me...please just be my friend and never let me find out.”

So Kurt's weak. It's no news to him. Hopefully if it comes to it, he'll be too busy with college and new friends and New York for it to hurt too badly when Harry, hopefully, with any mercy, lets Blaine gracefully slip out of Kurt's life.

And if he still knows about all of this tomorrow...

“Of course,” says Harry, in the bright, firm tone of Blaine's that Kurt knows means he's hurt. “I promise, Kurt.”

And there are so many more things to be said that apparently eight hours of night weren't enough to say, if Kurt could get his mouth around the words or he could trust anything Blaine-who-is-Harry says enough to really listen.

And maybe he'd have to try anyway, just to break the sudden silence that fell as soon as they left the shelter of the bedroom and the encouraging crackle and pop of the record player. But it's not even thirty seconds later that the creak of the front door cuts through the gurgling sound of the coffee pot, and Tilda's voice rings out with a decidedly uncheerful, “Oh thank holy crap you boys have coffee on, I call first cup,” and that's the end of that.

Probably that's for the best, anyway.

 

Tilda Eugenia Stone, commonly known as Mathilda J. Anderson, at least in the apparently-we're-all-called-Muggles world, comes in coated head to toe in a fine layer of pale green dust. She doesn't seem to be shedding it anywhere, and anyway this isn't Kurt's apartment, so he bites his tongue and holds back the pointed glare he can feel brewing right behind his eyes. Hopefully she'll appreciate his forebearance.

“Okay, sit,” she finally directs when the last omelet comes out of the pan. “Not you,” she adds, as Harry goes to take a chair at the table. “Take it to your room, turn the radio up, and give us an hour. You don't need to hear what he's going to say.”

“What am I going to say?” Kurt asks.

“Nothing he needs to hear, now get,” she insists. Blaine picks up his plate and his coffee mug, but hesitates, glancing back over his shoulder.

“Tilda, you can't—”

“I can whatever I need to, kid.”

“Not without telling him—”

“I'm going to tell him everything he needs to know just as soon as we have a nice breakfast and he has a chance at his coffee,” Tilda says, impatient and reasonable. Kurt eyes his mug and then puts it back down. He really wishes Blaine had left before he'd taken that first sip.

“You didn't have to hide it,” he says, and it _must_ be the truth. “I knew what we were going to do.”

“Still,” says Tilda, and prods experimentally at her omelet. “Small dose. Sip your coffee, it'll keep renewing itself and last as long as I need to talk to you, and wear off about five minutes after that. You, _leave_ , and not another word, he doesn't need you accidentally asking questions.” Kurt ducks his head to his own breakfast and doesn't look up until he hears the sound of a door being shut.

“So, how long does it take to kick in?” he asks, and daintily cuts off a bit of egg and red pepper.

“It already has,” she says, and gulps down basically half of her own coffee in one go. “I haven't asked you any questions yet, have I?”

“No, you haven't,” Kurt finds himself saying automatically, and then blinks. When he looks up, Tilda's smiling, pleasant and business-like.

“For the record, what's your full name and date of birth?” she asks.

“Kurt William Hummel, July 17, 1993.” It's an odd sensation, feeling his tongue start working before his brain decides to open his mouth. “This is really somewhat uncomfortable, you know,” he adds, and then stuffs another forkful of omelet into his mouth before he can say any more.

“Then we'll try to get through it quick. I'll wait until you swallow,” she adds, and Kurt does, suddenly imagining what might happen if she asked him a question and didn't bother to wait.

“Before you came down here this weekend, what were your feelings towards Blaine Anderson?” she asks.

Kurt thinks, _friendship_ , and _I'll tell her I cared about him deeply_ , but even as the thought crosses his mind his mouth is already working.

“I was in love with him and miserable about it.” He stares across the table in horror. It wasn't _in love_ , he hasn't used the words _in love_ since he was talking about Finn, a year and a half ago, and that had been a disaster, why would he even say—

“Why?” Tilda asks, like she can read his thoughts, but if she could do that she wouldn't be putting him through what's shaping up to be the single most humiliating experience of a life already full of them, and he's already answering, again,

“Because he's been kind, and charming, and actually bothers to listen when I'm upset about something instead of just blowing me off, and—”

“Stop, stop, I honestly don't give a fuck, clarification, why did being so completely gone over him make you miserable?” she says, waving him quiet with the hand holding her fork. She looks amused. Kurt is pretty sure that he looks completely horror-stricken.

“Because he said he isn't interested like that, but he keeps doing things that seem like flirting even though I was sure he didn't mean it, and I couldn't get over him if I kept letting myself think I have a chance.” He bites his lip, hard, but whatever magic truth-potion she slipped him seems to think that was enough humiliation for one question, because it lets him stop there. “I thought we were supposed to talk about how good I am at keeping secrets.”

“You think this isn't relevant?” she asks, raising her eyebrows.

“I think it's completely relevant, its just incredibly embarrassing and I wish we'd stop,” and this is officially the least fun Kurt's had at breakfast since the morning after dad and Carole's wedding when they kept trying to play footsie under the table and missing. He looks longingly at his coffee mug. He's too tired for this.

“Yes, you can keep drinking your coffee, kid, we're doing this one way or another and you obviously need the caffeine,” she says. “I promise, we'll put down the teen soap opera _Twilight_ questions in just a sec and move on to your self-assessment on your ability to withstand torture. One more question, though, how do you feel about him now?” Tilda nods past Kurt, in the direction of the bedrooms, like there was some kind of ambiguity in which 'him' she meant.

“I...don't know,” Kurt says, surprising himself when the truth potion whatever-it-is lets him get away with that. “Confused. A little betrayed. I think I still care about him, but I don't know how much or how much of it is real, and—”

“Not scared?” In any other conversation, Kurt would probably take offense at getting interrupted every time he tried to say something, but it's honestly sort of a relief, here.

“I'm afraid that my friendship isn't real and that this is going to break my heart.” Kurt closes his eyes. Maybe if he doesn't look he can pretend none of this is happening. He reaches for his coffee automatically, because his head hurts and it's too early in the morning to think properly, and only realizes after he's taken a sip that he probably wouldn't have gotten away with just leaving it sit for the rest of breakfast anyway.

“But not afraid that he's going to actively hurt you or someone else you care about,” Tilda clarifies, and it's not really a question but he has to answer anyway, apparently.

“No, not at all. Of course, you saying that makes me start to worry, but if anything he's ever told me that's true then I don't think it's any risk.” She doesn't ask about what kind of risk he thinks Blaine or Harry poses to people Kurt doesn't care about, so maybe it's a good thing he's finally managed to convince himself he doesn't care about Karofsky one way or the other. It's enough for the potion.

“Kurt,” she says, and he opens his eyes. “Breathe. Have some water. Eat your damn eggs, he may be short and kind of a dork but we both know the boy can cook. I promise not to repeat anything you tell me.” She doesn't end the sentence with 'okay?', and Kurt's grateful. He wants to go home and forget the past two days ever happened, only not really, and it's not actually okay at all.

 

The question-and-answer session lasts about 45 completely haphazard minutes, everything from, “So how do you _really_ feel about football?” (“It would be more entertaining if I didn't have to be afraid that any one of the players on the field might decide to beat me up for showing the slightest interest in them or their tight pants”) to “No really, on a scale of 1 to 10, how would you rate your probable ability to withstand physical torture?” (“About a 6 just on principle, but a 7 or 8 if I actually have a reason not to say. Not that I see why it matters, they could just do exactly what you've been doing to me and find out everything.”) Kurt feels completely drained. He's still wearing yesterday's clothes. At one point he told Tilda that if he and Blaine stopped being friends Kurt would probably sell him out for a lead role on Broadway and his own fashion line, so it's not like going through any of this actually gained him anything. He's about to lose his memory, his best friend is somebody completely different, and oh yeah, _magic is real_. He hasn't even had time to deal with the shock of processing that one, not with everything else going on.

Tilda refills his coffee once, and this time he sees her tip in a single drop of something utterly clear from a tiny bottle in her pocket. He drinks it anyway.

She's going to take his memory and at this point he almost doesn't even _care_ , if it means he never has to deal with any of this again, floating rocks and secret societies bent on enslaving all Muggles and conversations about things he'd been working so hard at not even admitting to himself. He helps bring the empty breakfast dishes to the sink.

“Kurt,” Tilda says, making him look up and over when he starts running the hot water and dabs some soap on the sponge. “Test it, how many fingers am I holding up?” She lifts three, and Kurt's traitor tongue seems content to let him choose what to say about it by now.

“Seventeen,” he says, just to be sure, and she smiles.

“You're a good kid,” she says, and he braces himself for the wand. “Kind of a brat, and I think we'd both better be glad I'm not the one who has to live with you, but you're good for him. Blaine deserves someone like you.”

There's a bit of melted cheese caked on one of the plates; Kurt scrubs at it carefully. “Don't you mean Harry?” he asks.

“You know who I mean,” she says, and then there's a hand on his shoulder, more of a jock's firm clap than a sisterly pat, getting pale green dust all over yesterday's shirt. “I'm gonna go shower. Say goodbye to him before you take off. Good luck at Regionals if I don't see you.”

Then she turns and walks out of the kitchen, Kurt staring after her uncomprehending.

He finishes cleaning the breakfast dishes before he knocks on Blaine's door. Harry's door. He needs to just pick one and stick with it, if only he could look at that face and think anything but an automatic _Blaine_.

“I still remember everything,” Kurt says, and that Blaine-face lights up instantly. “She said I could go.”

“Right! Right, of course, most of your stuffs still out in the living room, did you leave anything in here? Is there anything you want me—”

“Harry.” Kurt got it right that time, at least; he cuts off instantly and stares at Kurt blank-faced. “I'll call you,” Kurt says. “Tell your si—tell Tilda thanks.”

“Right. Right,” Harry says, and lets Kurt alone to collect his overnight bag, his shopping from Tuesday, his shoes. The sound of the shower is obvious behind the bathroom door, and he's not about to kick Harry out of his own room to change, so it's still yesterday's clothes. Lucky his dad will be at the shop by the time Kurt gets home, or he'd never stop with the questions.

Kurt hooks his iPod in to the stereo jack and thumbs viciously down to his _Glee Club '09-10_ playlist. He wouldn't even have a quarter of these songs if somebody in the club hadn't sung them. Almost universally, though, they're songs that don't have even a little bit to do with Blaine Warbler at all.

“ _And I am telling you, I'm not going_ ,” the music starts along with the car. He left it in alphabetical order by song title, then. He should shuffle it, but Bad Romance is just two songs on. Some days, everybody just needs a little Gaga to see them through.

 

Carole comes out of the kitchen to meet him as soon as he steps in the door, wiping her hands on a blue check dishtowel. “Oh, honey, you didn't have to come home early. Was everything okay there?”

“It was fine,” Kurt says mildly. He'll just wear his coat right up to his bedroom. “We were just both tired, and I think Mathilda wanted more time alone with Blaine than she usually gets. We'll see each other on Monday.” There's something else in her expression, and he _wishes_ he could call tiredness and just ignore it, but the kind of bad things that happen to people around Kurt Hummel can't afford to be ignored for six hours, even though Carole would probably let him. “Is something wrong?”

Her smile drops into something sad and sympathetic, and the floor of Kurt's stomach falls out. “Didn't you get my messages? Kurt, I'm so sorry.”

“Sorry about what?” he asks cautiously.

“Pavarotti,” Carole says. “Honey, I'm so sorry, Pavarotti died yesterday.”

For a moment all he can hear is the rushing white noise of relief—nothing is wrong with his dad, with Finn, with Mr. Schue or one of the other kids from the glee club—before it actually starts to register. Oh. Pavarotti. Pampered yellow little symbol of his new home. Tiny, feathery little Pavarotti, who would chirp in tune with Kurt's whistles in the morning.

He'd never had a pet before. Kurt supposes he might have some better frame of reference for what this is supposed to mean or feel like, if he had.

“Oh,” he says quietly.

“—everything just like you said on the list, right down to keeping him away from drafts.” Carole is saying. “You know I feel _terrible_ about this, Kurt. I promise, I did call as soon as we found him.”

“I believe you,” he says, feeling a little distant. Of course it would be yesterday. March 23 is probably going to end up seared in his memory as the day for unexpected things to happen. “I turned my phone off before the show, I must have forgotten it.”

She pauses, cocks her head to the side, and _looks_ at him with that prying parental-eyed gaze he's still getting used to seeing on any face other than his father's. “Honey, are you okay?”

“Just tired,” Kurt says. “We didn't sleep much last night. I think I'm going to go upstairs and take a nap.”

“Okay,” Carole says, just a little doubtfully. “You want me to wake you up before I head out?”

“I'll be all right. I'll leave a note for Finn or Dad when they get home,” he says. Not that he can necessarily think about _facing_ them right now...

“Don't worry about it, I'll make sure I leave one on the refrigerator,” she promises.

“Have a good day, Carole,” Kurt says, and heads for the stairs. Of course Pavarotti is dead. Everything else that made sense at Dalton is gone, why not him too.

His sheets are cool and beckoning, even though he makes sure to carefully sort his clothes into the laundry bin before he lets himself fall onto them. His moisturizer routine's already shot all to hell, just like all the laws of physics and the rest of reality. He can worry about it after he's slept.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> So yeah, I started writing this last summer. I posted the first half in September. I have no excuses, I just...here. Have a story. I hope you like it as much as I've loved working on it during the times when it was working, and forgive me for the time.
> 
> So many people to thank! First of all, crown_of_weeds read nearly this entire story in 400-word snippets via gchat while I was writing, and helped me fix half of them because half the time she knows what I want out of a story even more than I do. needsmoregreen gave me some of that for the first half of this part, though she hasn't seen the last 15k or so, because way the heck back when, I'd actually hoped to be done with this in time for her birthday. <3, bb; only a month late!
> 
> narie and theromanticnerd volunteered to do the traditional kind of beta-reading on this, because sometimes you need the eyes of someone who doesn't know what's going on in your head before they read it. Their help was invaluable, and they're definitely a huge part of the reason the climax of this story works as well as it does.
> 
> All of you guys who have kept up with this over the months in between, who've commented now and again just to remind me that somebody still cares, who've kept me going...you don't even know. Thank you so much. I hope this lives up to half your expectations.

The thing about Pavarotti is...

The thing about Pavarotti is that Kurt could never say the wrong thing to him and end it with either of them getting hurt. He didn't argue, he didn't play football, he didn't get into epic fights with his girlfriend and then expect Kurt to take his side. When the morning came and it was too early to deal with it, he didn't bury his head under his wing and refuse to go on for a few hours. He just sang.

Kurt's taking psychology this semester and he pays enough attention to recognize emotional displacement when he sees it. Pavarotti, though...he was simple. All he had to get through life were a few bright feathers and the song in his heart.

He never needed to make anybody afraid. He'd been scared sometimes, at first, but Kurt had learned about slow careful movements and patience. He perched on Kurt's fingers, sometimes, just a little. He was so tiny. He trusted.

The thing about Pavarotti is that when Kurt finally wakes up, all of three hours after he crawls into bed, breathing close against the cotton of his pillowcase, Pavarotti is the first thing that actually rises into his mind.

There should be a funeral. He doesn't know what the arrangements for a traditional canary funeral ought to entail, but Kurt Hummel has never let _anything_ keep him from planning an event and he won't disgrace Pavarotti's memory by letting this be a start. 

Finn and his dad aren't home yet, and Carole's left for work; she's on afternoon/evening shift this week, which is godawful for trying to put together any kind of regular family dinner, not to mention Kurt can't imagine what his father and Finn actually forage for themselves when she's at work and he's away. The house seems oddly quiet without anyone else home.

They only just finalized the sale over winter break; Kurt helped move in one weekend and then moved himself right back to Dalton for Monday classes. After sixteen and a half years of one set of creaks and thuds, shoddy acoustics and a kitchen sink that needed to be handled just so, this house is still a stranger to him. He doesn't dislike it, of course, he helped make the final decision on the sale, but it's all echoey and new. This may be, he thinks suddenly, the first time since they moved in that he's the only living thing in this house.

First things first. He shrugs into his medium weight spring bathrobe and heads down the hall to take advantage of the shower. There's nothing he can get done looking like _this_.

Finn sings in the shower—classic rock, mostly, or glee club assignments Kurt probably isn't supposed to hear any more, but the bathroom door's not as thick as Finn seems to think it is. Kurt prefers to concentrate on the careful use and application of his many bath products. Showers are good for many things, not the least of them for detaching oneself entirely from whatever sort of events may have preceded or even precipitated the need for a shower in the first place. Complex emotions have no place in Kurt's bathroom.

The hot water is cleansing, centering. His hand brushes over his usual shampoo, hesitates, then reaches for the aromatherapy big guns: cypress, grapefruit, and rosemary, with just a hint of bergamot. It fills the little room with fresh green-smelling steam, just a little bit of sharpness, enough to keep his eyes from drifting closed again. He has his rituals. Of course, he never expected Blaine would be the reason he’d have to use them...

Kurt spends exactly seventy-three minutes on his shower, subsequent hair styling, and emergency moisturizing facial triage procedures. Realistically speaking, he could find a way to spend at least another hour on his face, hair, and hands without even having to think about it hard. He only has another couple of hours to himself, though, before Finn and his dad appear and start asking questions he can’t begin to answer, and there are things he needs to deal with, somehow, one way or another.

Pavarotti. There will be a coffin, and a burial ceremony, just as soon as he makes the appropriate arrangements and finds out from Carole just where he is at the moment, and a memorial. There ought to be a memorial. They ought to be able to sing, for their fallen Warbler.

There ought to be somebody he can talk to about this, to find out if there are any specific traditions he needs to follow, to plan for the coming Monday, to commiserate over their lost comrade. There ought to be someone he could talk to, at least, if Mercedes and Rachel and Tina weren’t all at school and banned from talking to him this week. Wes is in Japan, David is in California. He could email Thad, he supposes, or even Wes, probably; he could email Jeff or Trent or Aaron or probably even just call Mark or Nick. They all have their own spring break plans of one sort or another, but none of them would mind, Kurt doesn’t think. It’s just that the first question out of any of their mouths or keyboards would inevitably be the same for every single one of them.

There ought to be somebody else he can talk to about this, but there’s really not. So with a heavy sigh, Kurt fishes his cell phone out of his bag, hits speed dial #4, and calls him.

Blaine-who-isn't-Blaine, who Kurt will have to treat as Blaine at least for the present if there's any hope of getting through this conversation, picks up on the third ring.

“Kurt?” he asks, all hope and wariness, and Kurt smooths his free hand down very firmly against the top of his desk.

“I don't want to talk about what we talked about last night,” he says before anything else. “I'm not done processing it and I haven't made any decisions. I just needed to call you and tell you that Pavarotti died last night.”

“Kurt, that's awful,” Blaine-we're-calling-him-Blaine says. “I'm so sorry, I know how much he meant to you.”

“He did,” Kurt concedes. His voice wobbles a little, but holds together. He can maintain dignity in his grief. “I'll need to make funeral arrangements. I wanted to know if the Warblers had any particular conventions for mourning the death of a mascot, or if I'll need to make it up as I go.”

“I think there's a customary moment of silence, but I'm pretty sure they'll go along with anything you want to do, so long as it doesn't completely preempt Regionals,” he says. “Are—are you okay?”

“A memorial, then, I think, during practice on Monday,” Kurt replies, ignoring the question entirely. “Followed by a burial later in the week, once I find a suitable spot and can retrieve the body from Lima without too much thawing. Small, tasteful, only those closest to him.” Pavarotti had belonged to someone before he was Kurt's. Someone else might care. Normally he'd just invite Blaine, but...

This would never have worked in the New Directions. There, if they'd ever gotten it together enough to _have_ traditions like a club mascot, and god forbid the hockey team hadn't decided to do something about that fact in the first week, any such deaths would have been a disaster of Puck mocking and Brittany trying to hold Kurt's hand and Rachel somehow managing to say exactly the wrong thing. And Puck would be right—it's stupid, after all, just a little canary, nothing important at all—but the Warblers won't care. They'll treat the event with uniform solemnity and respect. 

“That sounds good, Kurt,” says the biggest world-rending piece of confusion in Kurt's life right now. If only rending the world like that actually made anything else at all _stop_ , just long enough for Kurt to put the pieces back into some kind of order that actually made sense.

The one thing about New Directions is, however biased their competition solos, however much time Rachel spends insisting on making herself the center of all attention, they've never begrudged anybody the chance to stand up at the front of the room and sing. They saw any emotion under the sun in that choir room, that auditorium. There were the times when every one of them needed to vocally grab somebody by their lapels and _make_ them understand, and the times when just being able to stand and belt out the words was somehow enough. Grief, loss, confusion—those would only be the start of it.

It's not a Warblers thing to do at all, to stand out and sing about your emotions, to make an audience out of your fellow glee-clubbers rather than a backing choir.

“Thanks,” Kurt says to the boy whose love he's not even sure he wants any more, the only voice who's ever going to take a competition solo while this Council is in power. Blaine is...whoever he is, and however hard Kurt's ever tried, it hasn't really made a difference.

So he'll be himself, then, to hell with _trying_. Kurt stood up in front of a dozen people he was basically refusing to speak to, once, and sang one of his mother's favorite songs for the sake of a father who couldn't hear a word. It won't make them give him a solo, but the Warblers are too respectful not to give him this chance to mourn.

“I should go,” he says. “If I intend to surprise Finn and Dad with something a little bit healthier than I'm sure they've been eating lately, I need to get to the grocery store in time to start dinner.” He'll go through his mother's box of cassettes later, once the rituals of dinner and the chance to hug his dad for just a minute have made him calmer. Kurt thinks he might already know the right song in there.

“Yeah, sure, of course—Kurt,” says the boy on the other end of the line. “Thank you.”

Kurt forces a laugh, if only because his best dismissive smile can't be seen on the other end of the phone line. “I should be the one thanking you. Wouldn't want to offend half the council with an improper canary funeral.”

“You know that's not what I mean,” he says, Blaine Anderson and all the weight of Harry Potter, all the things Kurt isn't ready to talk about yet, and Kurt bites his lip.

“I know,” Kurt says. “Goodbye, Blaine.”

“Goodbye,” the voice at the other end of the phone says, and Kurt hits the disconnect button.

 

 

Carole's working until 9 on Friday, too, so after Kurt serves up a compromise of a guys' night dinner of low-sodium turkey burgers and sweet potato fries, they supplement family dinner night with family game night. Yet another thing Kurt never would have expected before actually moving in with Finn Hudson: he plays a cutthroat game of Monopoly. Pictionary is Kurt's game, and he always plays to win.

It's nice. Finn actually gets home from emergency extended glee practices in time to help Kurt slice strawberries for dessert, and by the time Carole gets home and finishes her reheated leftovers, there's a fully cooled strawberry meringue pie ready to be dished out and enjoyed while she and Finn absolutely cream Kurt and his dad at Spades.

He and Finn don't talk much, in the kitchen—dating or not, Finn is appropriately terrified of Rachel Berry as all glee club members should be—but he's a tall, solid presence on the other side of the island, just in the corner of Kurt's eye, keeping everything grounded and stable. Of course, he disappears Saturday morning without explanation, but Kurt supposes that, between Rachel's increasingly panicked competition-prep and Mercedes' impending family vacation, he's lucky to have seen any of his McKinley friends this weekend at all.

Instead, Kurt spends Friday, Saturday, and half of Sunday enjoying the opportunity to see his father. He hasn't been to the garage enough since starting at Dalton, but the smells of it all are as familiar as childhood, and his fingers still remember the grip of a wrench well enough. The clangs and dings and grinding metal may be loud, but they're familiar; everything in here is another reminder to Kurt of a world where the most important people in his life are just like the laws of the universe, safe and reliable as ever. A nut turned to the left comes loose, a battery always gets disconnected negative side first, and everything follows one step after the other.

Harry Potter is not any of those things, not safe, or reliable, or any way respectful of the laws of the universe, and Kurt really doesn't need that in his life right now. He just...wishes things were different, is all, because he might need Blaine.

Sunday night he makes the drive back to Dalton, waves at his roommate Zach, and spends the rest of the time until lights-out making plans to find the perfect spot for Pavarotti's burial. There's a bedazzled bird casket sitting in his room in Lima, ready for its little burden, but the mini-fridge in Kurt's dorm room can't even keep a pint of ice cream properly frozen. Decomposition is nobody's friend.

He'd sent out an email Thursday night, so everybody knows, at least. Still, the atmosphere walking into period 5 lunch-hour practice is very nearly as jovial as ever. They're a pack of teenage boys who went off to have marvelous adventures away from one another for a week. Kurt can't really begrudge them that.

He shows up just moments before late, when Harry has already had to sit himself across the room from the only empty seat left. Wes calls the meeting to order with a sharp bang of his gavel as soon as Kurt sits down. Kurt ignores any attempts to catch his eye.

“Welcome back,” Wes says pleasantly once all the hubbub has settled. “Now, for our first order of business, as you all know we lost one of our own this week. A moment of silence for Pavarotti.” Every Warbler in the room bows their heads, eyes down, mouths determinedly shut. Kurt fingers the cassette tape in his pocket.

“Now,” says Wes, a few moments later. “On to—Warbler Kurt?”

“If I may,” Kurt says, standing up briskly. “Pavarotti was one of us. He wasn't just a mascot, he was my friend.” Oh, no, his voice is cracking. If Kurt didn't know he could sing through much more pressing tears than this... “He wasn't just any canary. He was a Warbler. And if it's alright, I'd like to send him off properly, in the same way he lived. With a song.”

The Council exchange glances, but apparently one song doesn't count as derailing Regionals, because it only takes a second before they're nodding. Trent is right there, next to the tape player; Kurt hands the cassette off and readies himself.

“ _Blackbird singin' in the dead of night_ ,” There's no words for the _rightness_ of it, taking a head and a heart full of pain and truth and turning it into music. The Warblers don't _do_ this. “ _Take these broken wings and learn to fly. All your life,_ ” he sings, and keeping pace with the backing tape there's a bass line, now, somebody's low throbbing vocals, and another line, and another. “ _You were only waiting for this moment to arise._ ” The New Directions don't do _this._ But Kurt is a Warbler now, and Warblers lift each other. Warblers fly.

 

 

He manages to avoid Harry after the meeting, too, though there's an email from _b.anderson@daltonhs.edu_ sent out to the usual Monday movie-musical marathon crowd between sixth and seventh period saying that they won't be starting up until 5:30. Kurt's probably expected to show for that. He's come to nearly every one when his homework load wasn't completely prohibitive since starting at Dalton. Blaine...well, _Harry_ hosts them, but it's hard to reconcile any mental image Kurt has of Harry Potter, world-saving wizard and apparent total liar, with six hours of Judy Garland and Fred Astaire every other Monday night between last period and curfew. 

Usually they'd start at 4, but with Regionals in less than a week the Warblers are on a twice-a-day rehearsal schedule, and at 3:15 it's back to the same practice room for yet another argument about how best to arrange the backing vocals on their P!nk medley to best support their lead singer. Kurt's been painfully aware of Blaine for months, but really, does he have _anything_ in his life that doesn't somehow revolve around somebody he may never be able to trust again?

Two minutes into an argument about how best to play devoted fanboys to his very shadow, Harry raises his head and waves a single, regal hand. “I'm tired of this,” he declares.

“You're right,” says Thad. “We should just let you decide which arrangement you want to sing.”

“No, I mean I'm tired of being treated like some kind of Chosen One,” says Harry, standing up abruptly. “Mine isn't the only voice in this group, I think we've proved that today already. Pavarotti's voice was silenced by death. I don't want to silence anyone else.”

“Blaine, perhaps five days before Regionals isn't the time,” David suggests gently, but Harry waves him off.

“We are going to lose at Regionals,” he declares.

There's pandemonium, but not the sort that would come up if Kurt ever dared say the same thing. It's a low, excited buzz, quiet enough for Harry to go on without raising his voice more than a little. “No, hear me out,” he says, and the room quiets. “I'm flattered and grateful for all the faith you've shown me this year, but from what Kurt has told me about New Directions, it's going to take a lot more than just me to beat them. We have such a range of talent in this group, and we need to make more use of it. This is why I propose,” he says, turning from the council to face the Warblers at large, “that we rearrange our opening number, and turn it into a duet.”

Oh, _there's_ the sort of pandemonium Kurt was looking for. David throws his hands in the air. “Why don't we just play it on kazoos?”

“Warbler Blaine, we have five days before Regionals,” Wes says, gavel cutting through the hubbub but barely making a dent in the noise. “How do you propose we arrange and master a new number in such a short time?”

Honestly, what _is_ this? Kurt found out about his secret life, so now Harry Potter's decided he doesn't want all of Blaine's solos? Or maybe it doesn't have anything to do with Kurt at all—he wouldn't rule it out, seeing as how he clearly doesn't know anything that goes on in Blaine or Harry's head on a daily basis. Apparently right now that means turning the Warblers into some sort of pale copy of the New Directions' inevitable pre-competition drama. Well, so be it.

“We have another member who can master a lead solo in less time than that,” Harry says steadily. “I think he proved it today at lunch. I want to sing the duet with Kurt.”

Kurt's pretty sure his mouth falls fully open. It's everything he ever wanted with the Warblers, of course, and if this were a week ago...oh, but if this were a week ago it would be just one more painful step in Blaine's endless campaign of ignorant not-quite-seduction, so much and yet so far away, and now it's gone even farther. Harry, Harry, what is he _doing_.

“That's ridiculous,” Kurt finds himself saying on auto-pilot. “There are so many great voices in this group. If we're going to have a duet then everyone should have a chance at that honor.”

“Let's put it to a vote,” says Wes, and bangs the gavel. “Everyone in favor of Warbler Blaine's proposed duet with Warbler Kurt?”

Every single hand in the room goes up, even Grumpy Other Nick who stands in the back and never votes yes to anything. Kurt makes sure. He counts twice.

“All right, then,” says Wes with a pleased smile Kurt can't begin to interpret right now. 

“Congratulations, Kurt,” adds Thad. Wes bangs the gavel again.

 

 

Kurt shows up for movie-musical marathon Monday. It would be rude not to, and besides, it's Bohemia night, _Moulin Rouge_ back-to-back with _Rent_. Which may leave him weeping into his pillowcase at the end of the night from sheer tragic overload, but at least then he'll have an excuse for it. 

When they start right after classes, there's usually time for three movies, or at least most of them, and people wander in and out with snacks or dinner in the gaps. Tonight, Kurt detours through the dining hall after practice gets out and forces himself to linger over chicken Caesar salad. He'll miss the first few minutes of the movie, but he could recite the entire narcoleptic Argentinian/Sound of Music scene from memory, so it doesn't seem like that much of a loss.

The 3rd floor lounge isn't packed when Kurt finally shows up, but there's six or seven boys sprawled around watching with varying levels of interest, not to mention Harry himself, who is apparently too raptly engrossed in Christian's first visit to the famed cabaret to even notice Kurt come in for a good five minutes.

By the time he glances up, Kurt's settled in to an empty armchair, vaguely thinking about getting out tomorrow's calculus homework versus his _rédaction_ for Mme. Arnaud. Doing French in front of this particular movie does have a certain appropriateness to it, he supposes—only there's Harry at his elbow, looking at him with Blaine's best entreating face and nodding towards the door.

Kurt's never been able to resist any of Blaine's entreating faces, no matter how many times he's told himself to start. He marks his chair with his schoolbag and follows him out into the hall.

“Hey,” Harry says lamely, fidgeting a little behind his back. “I thought maybe we could talk about picking a song for our duet.”

Kurt sighs. “Why, Blaine?” he asks. It would be one thing to have half the third floor realize Blaine and Kurt are fighting, another altogether for them to be fighting while Kurt's calling Blaine by completely the wrong name.

Harry looks confused. “Why did you insist on doing this duet with me?” Kurt clarifies. “What, is it—is it some kind of bribe?” Harry flinches, and Kurt darts quick eyes down the hallway, just in case. They shouldn't be talking about this here, but he doesn't really want to talk about this at all, so he just leans in close and lowers his voice to a hiss just a bit above a whisper. “I keep people's secrets, Harry. Remember Karofsky? I'm not going to betray you, you don't need to just... _hand_ me a competition solo on a silver platter to keep me happy with you.”

“No, Kurt, that's not it.” Harry twists his hands uncomfortably, glancing down the hallway himself. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath. Opens them.

“Sometimes...sometimes, in life, there comes a moment when you open your eyes and say, 'Oh, there you are. I don't have to be alone any more.' Last week, even after everything, when you still called me when Pavarotti died...that was the moment. For me, about you.”

And...oh. Because Kurt _knows_ that moment. It's what it feels like to have six voices join together on an empty stage for the very first time, singing about believing. It's a hand in a hand and, “I know a shortcut.” That moment is everything. He just never thought Harry...that _Blaine_....might need it too.

“You scare me, Kurt,” Harry admits, ducking his head, running one hand over his slicked-back hair. “Not because of what you know, or what you can do, but because...you make me want things that it hasn't been safe to want in so long. For me...doing this duet would just be an excuse to spend more time with you.”

Kurt breathes. Inside the room, a new swell of laughter rises, crests, and falls again. Kurt's seen this movie so many times that he should be able to track exactly which part it is, but he's fumbled his sense of time and he can't figure out whether it's the mistaken identity scene on stage with Toulouse, or the aborted audition/seduction/poetry reading.

Harry who's spent three years pretending to be Blaine looks up at the laughter too, with a similar lost sort of expression that Kurt figures must be on his own face. They've watched _Moulin Rouge_ together at least twice, and Harry had known all the lyrics to sing along the first time.

“We should get back inside,” Kurt says quietly. “They'll be wondering where their host is.”

“Kurt...” 

“Come on,” says Kurt. “Email me with song ideas tonight.”

 

 

He skips out on the second movie, too many thoughts and too much meaning attached to the people in this room and the first play he and really-just-call-him-Harry ever went to see together. Somewhere around nine, he finds a new email in his inbox with a list of seven different song suggestions and a smiley face that somehow manages to look pleadingly hopeful.

Kurt stares at it for a while. He hasn't even heard of one of the songs, has to click the accompanying Youtube link just to figure out what it is. Three of the options are unambiguous, no doubt about it love songs. The rest are confusing, heartfelt solos that might be about life or friendship or love or any of the above, from the usual Blaine Anderson Top 40 standards to folk songs so old Kurt wouldn't have guessed the Blaine he knew last week even knew the words, before he'd seen the record collection.

In the end, he makes sure he's invisible on IM and Gchat and Facebook, and sends just one sentence in reply.

_Why did you spend sixteen hours on a Saturday with David and Nick, arranging songs that you knew the Warblers were never going to sing for anything more than practice?_

He spends five minutes trying to type up his French homework, and seventeen minutes browsing mens' designer footwear on Ebay, before he gets a reply.

_It was just for fun. If you want to do one of those songs instead, we can do that. Do you want to try to rearrange 'Bills, Bills, Bills' into a duet, or do 'Grenade' or something else? I just think 'Grenade' seems kind of depressing for Regionals. We could do 'Animal'?_

Kurt stares at the message for just long enough to read the whole email before he drops his head into his hands. The response he eventually sends back is even shorter.

_What's your favorite Sondheim song?_

RENT has to be right around the funeral scene, Kurt thinks. When they watched the stage show together, Kurt hadn't been able to keep a dry eye almost the entire time. It still only takes five minutes to get an email back.

_Um. 'Somewhere', probably? Or 'No One Is Alone', if I feel like getting emotional. Almost anything from A Little Night Music, musically, but I don't really have a favorite there. I know you're a fan of Gypsy. Is there anything from there you'd want to sing? Sondheim's a little out of the usual Warblers range, but I think we could talk them into it._

Kurt could list his top ten favorite Sondheim songs in order of preference, length, or chronology of the musical, without more than ten seconds' thought. So could Rachel, of course, but the rest of New Directions would stare at anyone asking them like they had a second head. David could probably hum along to most of the more popular ballads if somebody bothered to tell him the difference between Stephen Sondheim and Stephen Schwartz, and Wes wouldn't know _Sweeny Todd_ if it bit him in the...well, anywhere cannibals bite. Most of the other Warblers would come down the same way.

Maybe Blaine Anderson is supposed to just be a temporary disguise for some guy who does magic and flies on a broomstick, but there's got to be a line between learning the appropriate pop culture references to fit in with the popular kids in glee club, and six or seven hours of movie musicals, every other Monday, come hell, high water, or finals week. At a certain point, the things that Blaine always knew or said or loved that brought Kurt close to him...well. Maybe Harry was faking all along, but he still owns the entire life works of Gilbert and Sullivan on vinyl, and even if you don't mean to care when you _start_ something like that, by the end of it... 

Finally, Kurt types back one more question. He doesn't even know what the answer to this will mean, only that he'll probably smile at Harry/Blaine in class tomorrow and not go out of his way to avoid him at lunch, either way.

 _Which is better_ , he writes, _flying or singing?_

Kurt goes back to his French essay after that, forcing himself into focusing with the iron discipline of someone who doesn't really want to know the answer to his question. He doesn't let himself check his email again until Zach's come back to the room for the night, damp from the shower and crowing about his M&M wins in some kind of illicit first-night-back poker game up in Stephen's room on the sixth floor. He has one new message.

 _I can't even answer that_ , Harry writes. _It's the same thing. You take a deep breath and let_ go _, and if you do it right, there's just no more gravity. It feels the same._

 _When you're flying, though, if you're good, you can change direction just like that, go anywhere you want to go, leave everybody else behind. When you're singing you've got to stick to the path, but if you're good, you can bring everybody else with you._

_I don't know, Kurt. I love them both. I just know that, when I had to stop flying, I don't think I'd have survived it if I hadn't started singing instead._

_(P.S. you are going to delete these emails, right? I don't think they know much about how to work a computer, but still, it's not really all that safe.)_

Kurt reads the message three times, until he absolutely has to get down to the bathroom for his evening routine unless he wants to do without. He writes back,

_I like the third song, on your original list. Let's do that one._

 

 

They lose miserably at Regionals. It isn't really a surprise.

Coach Sylvester and Aural Intensity have an entire set custom-designed to pander to the judges' every bias. The New Directions somehow took advantage of the extra week with no rehearsal space and no Mr. Schuester to write their own set of completely original songs—songs that have all the Warblers on the edge of their seats and Kurt applauding wildly against the bitter ache in his swelling heart. They learned about abusive relationships in Psychology last month. This is the part that kept Kurt showing up at school morning after morning, coming back for more slushies and locker-checks and humiliation long after anyone sane would have fled. For all the pain and fear, every once in a while, there was Finn in a red plastic dress.

It wasn't enough. It wouldn't have saved his life. But, god help his weak and yearning heart, he stares at the twelve of them on stage thirsty for it.

The Warblers, they have Kurt and Harry. Blaine. Blaine, when he's like this, standing in front of hundreds of people, _American_ and _Muggle_ and all those other things he wasn't born plastered all over him. The Warblers have two boys singing a duet to a girl’s song that Kurt doesn’t even altogether understand. It doesn’t mean anything about them, not really. That’s why he picked it off the list, because “ _lying in my bed I hear the clock tick and think of you_ ” is far and away too much a confession and he doesn’t think he could ask “ _did they get you to trade a walk-on part in a war for a lead role in a cage?_ ” for anything in the world.

This song doesn’t mean any more than that the singer’s range suits Kurt nicely and it’s easy to arrange the accompaniment for _a capella_ vocals. “ _Just because everything’s changing doesn’t mean it’s never been this way before_ ,” he sings, and it rises up almost like Harry's broomstick, as graceful as Kurt can shape the notes, but empty. “ _You'll come back when it's over, no need to say goodbye._ ” Goodbye was never a risk with them, not really. He smiles across the stage, feels Blaine's brown eyes warm and open and heavy on him without needing to look, feels the returning smile. 

New Directions is a whole row of pale blue taffeta, impossible to miss. They're close enough to the stage for Kurt to catch glimpses of Rachel and Mercedes' smiles, of _Finn_. He steps to the side and lets Blaine take the last verse. 

“ _Let your memories grow stronger and stronger 'til they're before your eyes,_ ” he sings. “ _You'll come back when they call you, no need to say goodbye._ ” They're close at the front of the stage, now; Blaine makes a little half-motion towards Kurt's hand, but it never connects. Kurt joins in for the last lines anyway. “ _You'll come back when they call you, no need to say goodbye_.” 

Rachel is the first person on her feet. Kurt bows quickly and then tucks himself back in with the rest of the Warblers so he doesn't have to see the pride and affection shining on her face any more. 

It's a solid performance and _Raise Your Glass_ goes off without a hitch, but Aural Intensity started things off with exactly the lie the judges wanted to hear, and the New Directions finish the night with unvarnished truth. McKinley takes it by a landslide, and Kurt can't even say he's surprised. He would have loved New York. He wonders if Tilda would even have let Harry go. 

This time, he doesn't have a chance to sneak off to the New Directions green room as soon as results are over. The Warblers have Kurt and Blaine crowded in their midst for commiserations and congratulations and more applause than Kurt's gotten for a losing duet since _Le Jazz Hot_. Every time he turns around, somebody else is patting him on the back, too soft to bruise. 

 

 

Kurt drives back to Dalton early Sunday morning, thermos full of late canary and crushed ice sitting next to the coffin on the seat beside him. In the end, he hadn't sent out any emails, just a single text. 

Harry meets him at 10 AM under a winter-bare tree on the northwest edge of campus, shovel still in hand. Kurt transfers the little body into its casket before setting out over the athletic fields and past the centennial rose garden. He's the only pall bearer and there's barely been a funeral, but it's still a measured, mournful trek.

He greets Harry with a wan smile. The hole he's dug looks dark and cold. Everything dies alone, Kurt supposes. At least Pavarotti didn't live that way. 

“Farewell, Pavarotti,” Harry says as Kurt kneels down to gently lower the casket into the ground. “Dalton has never known a better bird.” 

“No,” Kurt says, blinking back the tears he'd sworn he was done shedding. “No, I don't suppose it has.” 

He stands, brushes the crumbs of dirt from his pants, and gazes down at the bedazzled little box. “Goodnight, sweet prince,” he says quietly, because someone should. 

Harry is standing just a few inches too close, near enough to brush the backs of his fingers against Kurt's gloved hand. “It reminds you of your mother's funeral, doesn't it?” he says. Kurt wishes he could say no, but a cold dark hole in the ground is a cold dark hole in the ground, no matter who's been lowered into it. 

“The coffin was bigger,” he says instead, “but yes.” 

“I'm sorry this is hard—” Harry starts. 

“It's fine,” Kurt says abruptly, then regrets it. No one should fight at a funeral. 

“I'm sorry we lost Regionals,” Harry says instead. “I know how much that meant to you.”

“Thank you,” says Kurt. “I just...I really wanted to win.” 

“Hey,” says Harry, with what might even be a genuine smile. “At least we got to sing a great duet together, right?” One corner of Kurt's mouth tilts up, a little crooked. “And we've got each other. That beats a stupid trophy any day. Right?” His hand reaches out, a little less tentatively, and Kurt lets their fingers tangle together, almost like the very first day they met.

He's Blaine, or at least, all of the Blaine Kurt's ever known has to be in him somewhere, right? His eyes are warm brown and earnest, his most honest smiles are still the same, nothing's changed in the body that's drawing closer to Kurt's even now.

“I'm so glad, Kurt,” he says. “I just really...” His right hand tightens around Kurt's fingers, his left hand comes up halfway, stops, hangs there in the air like the clouds of their breath, and Harry-who-is-Blaine takes a deep breath and asks, “Can I kiss you right now?”

Kurt jerks away like the hand holding his is suddenly fire-hot, the part of his head clamoring at him that, _Now! Now! You idiot, what are you doing?!_ drowned out by the even-louder voice shrieking in Harry's direction: _Now? NOW? You IDIOT, what are you DOING?_ After everything. Harry Potter has an even worse sense of appropriate timing than Blaine Anderson, and it's not fair, it's not _fair_. 

“Why would you even ask me that?” Kurt blusters. “We're at a funeral.”

“I, I'm sorry, I just...” Harry raises his hands defensively. “I thought you might...at Valentine's day, you seemed like you wanted—” 

“Well that was before I realized I didn't even know what country you grew up in, let alone what you've really been thinking for six months, or, or, what you want to be when you grow up, or even what to _call_ you in my head!” says Kurt.

“You can just call me Blaine,” says Harry. Says Blaine. Says whoever. 

“It's not your real name,” Kurt says. 

“No, but it...” He spreads his hands, helplessly, brown eyes pleading. “This is me. You know more about me than anyone else in the world. Yeah, Harry Potter, all of that, it's where I come from and who I _was_ , but this...Blaine, Dalton, the Warblers...you...it's all I have. It's not like I get to take the stage makeup off at night and go be someone else. This is it.”

“Blaine,” says Kurt. It comes out just a little heavy, for a name he's said so many times. “I just...” 

“No, I know,” says the other boy. “We're at a funeral. Forget I said anything, I shouldnt have—” 

“I just need _time_ ,” Kurt interrupts him. “It's been a week and a half. I still _care_ , this still _matters_ to me, I just need time before...well, before _anything_."

“Okay,” says Blaine-who-used-to-be-Harry. “Yeah, that's...I'll be here. When you're done needing time, I mean, or, in the meantime, if you just want to hang out, or sing, or prep for the Warblers' next nursing home show, or—” 

“Blaine,” Kurt says again, and it comes out easier this time. “I know. I'm not going anywhere either. Except back up to the school for hot coffee, because it's way too cold out here for this kind of thing.” 

“Right, we should fill in the hole,” Blaine says. “Let me just find the shovel.” 

They pile dirt up over Pavarotti's casket until the top of the little grave is more-or-less even with the surrounding ground, bare even of dead grass and mounded, just a little, so it stands out. 

 

 

It's awkward, that week, but less than before instead of moreso. Kurt does his best to shove _'he asked if he could kiss me he asked if he could_ kiss _me,'_ as far down the back of his head as it will go. Instead, he just...pays attention. 

He'd practically made an Olympic sport out of Blaine-watching before all this began. All he has to do is reframe what he's looking for a little bit, instead of playing some only very nominally more respectable game of 'he loves me/he loves me not'. Now, Kurt's playing 'Blaine vs. Harry'. 

It's Blaine who schedules Sondheim Night for next Monday, it's got to be, because for all the bits and pieces Kurt's heard about him Harry Potter wouldn't give a...a used broomstick, about Movie Musical Monday. It's Harry who gets so, so bored in History, and Blaine who keeps pulling himself upright in his seat to make himself look alert, and always claims in Warblers meetings that he enjoys it anyway. It's Harry who hates action movies, and secretly likes sixties and seventies folk, and has chronic insomnia. It's Blaine that remembers Kurt's coffee order, but not because he thinks he's supposed to or has to or the mythical character of Blaine Anderson would. It's both of them who smile _that smile_ when Kurt shows up at the Lima Bean and finds him waiting with a nonfat mocha all ready, the smile Kurt's always trusted to be true. 

It's confusing. But it's not wrong. 

The week after Regionals and Pavarotti's funeral is subdued around Dalton, the entire flock of Warblers moping about one or the other and bringing the whole school down around them, but Kurt feels curiously undepressed. He's lost so many things so many times, at McKinley, that he's almost used to it. There's enough other drama going on for this to be any New Directions competition. Maybe it follows the members, like some curse, or haunting ghost, keeping them from ever having an uneventful competition even after they've left. He should try to find Matt Rutherford's email address, so he can check. Or maybe he should just ask Tilda. 

It's nice to go home at the end of the week, now that Finn and Rachel and Mercedes are all talking to him again. Not to each _other_ , Mercedes informs him, since Finn is apparently dating Quinn again—and where has Kurt _been_?—and Rachel keeps alternating between swearing she's over it and gazing longingly from across corridors. But at least they're all talking to Kurt, and he has a week's worth of variably nonsensical texts from most of the girls in New Directions to prove it. (Some of the most comprehensible ones come from Brittany. He wonders if he's supposed to be surprised about that.) 

In the end, since a Boyfriendless Diva slumber party is a must but that won't get him any face time with Tina, and where Brittany goes so goes Santana, who's not exactly a good mix with any of the other girls in a confined situation without alcohol or somebody to make out with for hours on end, and that's not even bringing up the question of Quinn, Kurt simply sends out a mass text that he'll be holding court at the mall all day on Saturday. Anyone who cares to make up for the past few weeks of total radio silence can find him there.

“Kuuuuuuuurt!” he hears, piercing over the low hum of an early-morning mall atrium. He turns; there's a whirl of blond hair and dark green, a brighter blotch of orange nearer the ground, and then Brittany's throwing herself into his arms with just enough warning for Kurt to spin around with the momentum instead of sending them both flying. 

“Hello, Brittany,” he says, muffled a little in her hair. “Hi, Artie.” 

“Sup, man?” Artie greets, holding out a fist. Kurt bumps it carefully with the hand not wrapped around Brittany's waist. 

“Well, you caught me on my way to do some serious browsing at Macy's. What about you two, what brings you out so bright and early on a Saturday morning?” 

“Clothes shopping,” says Artie with a shrug. 

“Artie's mom gave him two hundred bucks to get new pants,” Brittany says. “ _I_ said I didn't know why, since everybody knows the only reason to get new pants is if they make your butt look cute, and I think Artie's butt looks cute anyway.” 

Kurt raises an eyebrow at that and chooses not to comment. Artie wheels in a little closer, lowering his voice a little. 

“I was actually kind of hoping you could give us a hand with that? Brittany's great with fashion and everything, but not so much with math, and I was kind of hoping I could get, like, three or four pairs of pants and still have fifty bucks left over so I could take her to Breadstix without my mom asking questions about the money.” Brittany beams at him. Kurt supposes he knows what they're doing tonight. 

“Well,” he says, straightening up and adjusting the fall of his already-perfect tie. “We'll see what we can do. I don't suppose I could interest you in a few new sweaters while we're here...?” It's traffic cone orange. Artie has a particular style and he owns it, and Kurt made a point to stop making comments on other people's fashion sense after he started being friends with Rachel, if only to save himself the hypocrisy of it all, but it's still _traffic cone orange_. Artie looks about as interested as Kurt expected. “No? All right then, off to Macy's it is.” 

Kurt leads the way, Brittany dropping back to push Artie's wheelchair down to the other end of the mall. “So what's been going on with my former glee club this week? Any big diva meltdowns, now that you know I'm not going to be feeding information to the competition?” 

“Nah, it was all cool. On Thursday Puck and Sam got into a huge guitar-off, that was pretty epic. It was like John Mayer and Bob Dylan meet _Deliverance_.” 

“Lord Tubbington totally scared off our usual deliverance guy after he caught him smoking in the side yard, and now my mom has to pick up all of our packages at the UPS office,” Brittany offers. There's a beat, while Kurt wonders vaguely whether the cat or the UPS guy was the one smoking, and whether he should feel some sort of surprise. He and Artie share the obligatory ' _Did she just? Okay, let's go with it,_ ' look, and move on. 

“Good to know you've all started right in on preparing for Nationals, then,” says Kurt. “No wonder you have to do your pants shopping at 8:00 on a Saturday morning.” 

Artie snorts. “We wanted to catch you before everybody else showed up, yo,” he says reproachfully. “How else were we going to get five minutes to see you?” 

Kurt sniffs delicately. “Clearly you underestimate my stamina for shopping. I have every intention of being here until the mall closes.” 

“I think you're underestimating how many people want to see you today,” says Artie. “Hell, you didn't even text half of us.” 

Kurt stops in his tracks. “I didn't think you'd be interested. Why, who else is coming?” 

“Santana's meeting us after we buy pants,” says Brittany. “She said she wanted to see if you'd help her in Victoria's Secret.” Kurt really wishes he were better at not blushing by now. 

Artie coughs and hides a smile behind one hand. “Also, you didn't hear it from us, but if you head down to the food court around 11:30 I'm pretty sure Sam and Puck are planning on putting aside their differences and busking for loose change or lost Warblers,” he says. “Also if they don't run into you Puck may have said something about going to find you and dragging you for soft pretzels or something. But, like I said, you didn't hear it from me.” 

“Oh,” says Kurt. He'd expected maybe Mercedes, Rachel, and Tina, with or without Mike, maybe Brittany or Santana if they were bored. He'd just had dinner with Finn last night and Finn hadn't said anything about any of this. 

But then, Finn wouldn't, Kurt thinks with resigned affection as they wheel into the men's section. He probably didn't even put Puck and Sam's busking plans together with Kurt's shopping. Kurt wouldn't have, if Artie hadn't said anything. He makes a mental note to pretend to be surprised. It won't be too hard. 

True to Brittany's word, Santana is dawdling around the front entrance to Macy's when they leave, leaning against a column while she texts and drawing eyes from no fewer than four guys between the ages of fifteen and forty who just happen to be in the area. Brittany smiles at her, but instead of linking pinkies Santana plants herself at Kurt's other side and drapes a much-too-friendly arm over his shoulder. He'll have to figure out what's going on with that, as soon as he survives the next hour.

Luckily Mercedes texts and saves him only about twenty minutes into the Victoria's Secret debacle, and after that the day flies by, swift and furious, most of it spent doubled over in laughter. It's the first time he's really had a chance to hang out with Lauren Zizes, and not only does she have Puck on a chain shorter than a pit bull with a bad attitude, she's hilarious. 

Kurt glimpses red out of the corner of his eye around midafternoon and almost freezes to the spot. It's a couple of guys from the basketball team, and they seem content to leave the group—now down Artie and Brittany, but up Mike and Sam and Puck and Zizes—alone for now. Kurt doesn't let it bother him for more than a minute. 

 

 

Kurt gets back to Dalton a little after dinner hour on Sunday, the time when, he knows from long experience, Blaine's roommate can be found without fail finishing the weekend's homework in Alexander Rajan's room. Kurt only stops at his own room long enough to leave his bag. He'll unpack between curfew and lights-out. 

He knocks on Blaine's door and fidgets minutely with his already-perfect lapels while he waits. It's only a moment; Blaine's eyes widen with surprise, then relief, then soften back into nonchalance, but Kurt's been learning to look. He smiles. 

“Can I come in?” he asks. “Are you busy?”

“Um, yeah, I mean, no, I mean—come in, Ian's—” 

“Getting Alex to finish his homework again?” Kurt finishes. Blaine flushes, shrugs, nods, closes the door behind them. 

“Yeah, same as ever.” Kurt wanders over towards the window. He's still not used to feeling like the calmer, less-flustered one of the two of them. He's still not quite used to a lot of things. 

“Can I get you any water, or a snack, or...” Kurt lays a hand on the windowsill, twisting to stare out, empty tree branches reaching black across the evening-gray sky. Blaine trails off. 

“I miss my friends,” says Kurt. “I didn't even have friends for most of my life, but then there they were, the whole, self-imploding misfit group. They didn't notice when Karofsky...” He diverts himself from that sentence promptly, looks down to examine his fingernails. “They didn't notice a lot of things, and I honestly think there were times when Quinn would have put poison in somebody's food if it would have gotten her what she wanted, but they're my friends. And I still love them.” 

“Kurt, I--” Blaine's voice is rich with sympathy; the next two words out of his mouth are already inevitable, going to be— “I'm sorry.” Kurt smiles, small and a little sad. 

“What were your friends like?” he asks. “Before Calhoun, I mean.” 

Blaine starts, a little. He glances quickly at the door. Kurt rolls his eyes. 

“Do you trust me or not?” he asks. “I promise, I won't tell a soul.”

“No, it's not that,” says Blaine. “It's just...” Finally, he drops into his wheeled desk chair with a sigh. “I miss them a lot, Kurt,” he says quietly. “I don't like to think about it, because there's nothing I can _do_ , but...”

Kurt leaves the windowsill for the edge of Ian's bed, close as he can get to Blaine without actually coming quite into touching-distance, at least while he's sitting down. “Tell me about them?” he asks. 

“Kurt, I don't know...” Blaine looks conflicted. Not hounded, though, just conflicted, so Kurt just meets his eyes calmly. 

“Please,” he says. Blaine takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly. 

“Ron,” he says. “He was my first real friend. We met when I was eleven, on the train, on the way to school. He had red hair, he was tall. And Hermione, she was our second real friend, I told you about them the other week. She was...smart.” 

“Red-headed and smart. That's descriptive,” Kurt says dryly. 

“Well, how would you describe your friends to someone who's never met them?” Blaine counters. Kurt opens his mouth to retort, and then shuts it, struck by the complete impossibility of describing Brittany S. Pierce or Rachel Berry to anyone. 

“Point taken,” he allows. “So start small. What did they like? What did you do when you weren't saving the world?” 

“Quidditch,” Blaine says, smiling a little faraway. “Ron never made the team while I was there, but we'd go out to the pitch and practice sometimes, and we'd sit in the common room just going on and on about his favorite team and old matches and such. Hermione didn't care at all, she'd always have a book, but sometimes she'd ask questions and she always came to house games.” 

“What did you talk about with her?” Kurt prompts. He leans forward to get comfortable, elbows resting on his legs, listening. Blaine twists his mouth up wry.

“Homework, a lot of the time,” he says. “Or whatever was trying to kill us that year. All the serious things, Hermione was...you could always count on her. Even when she was mad at us for hating her cat, or because we didn't care enough about saving the house-elves, she always came through.” 

“Who else?” Kurt asks. Blaine had mentioned dorms, houses; Kurt could try to explain Mercedes and Rachel and diva slumber parties, but it wouldn't be _right_ without explaining Finn, too, not any more—and then the rest of New Directions, greater together than the sum of their parts. Dalton is starting to feel a little like that, too, and Blaine must know what Kurt means because he just nods. 

“Ron's older brothers,” he says. “He had—he has five of them, and Percy was kind of an ass, but Fred and George were the most...they're practical jokers, the best I've ever seen, Nate O'Conner's got nothing on them. They turned Neville into a canary once with a trick dessert. They were on the Quidditch team, they were great, they...” 

“Good friends?” Kurt asks. 

“They were like family,” Blaine admits. “The only one I had.” 

“Oh,” says Kurt, and imagines, just for a second, losing Finn and Carole like that. 

“And Dean, and Seamus, and Ginny, and Neville,” Blaine continues before Kurt can even figure out what to say. “Neville was like you.” 

“Extraordinarily fabulous with excellent taste in scarves?” Kurt guesses. Blaine laughs, the first real, present smile Kurt's seen on him tonight, and shakes his head. 

“Braver than anyone gave him credit for,” Blaine says.

“Oh,” says Kurt, again, and looks down at his hands. 

“I wonder about him sometimes,” Blaine continues past the pause. “I never really thought about what was going on with him until I was gone. Just like Hermione and Ron. I still want to know if they ever got together.” 

“They were still stuck in the middle-school rut of only glancing over when the other one was looking away?” Kurt guesses. Blaine smiles and glances down at his own hands, so he misses Kurt's self-aware blush.

“In their defense, we _were_ only fourteen at the time,” Blaine says. “And I was totally oblivious, but yeah, in retrospect...” He grins and looks up, leaning forward, all awkwardness repressed, at least for now. Kurt lets it go, the I-glance-you-glance-away game, Blaine's question over Pavarotti's grave last weekend, shoves it down and leans forward to listen. “So there was this dance our fourth year, the Yule Ball, right, and in retrospect I'm pretty sure Hermione was waiting for like two months for Ron to ask her...” 

 

 

Kurt is good at secrets. 

You wouldn't think it, given the years he spent in what was apparently the most celophane closet ever, but Kurt knows the secret about secret-keeping. Most of the time, when it's not about something so blatantly obvious that aliens on Mars could probably tell he was gay, keeping a secret doesn't really require lying about anything. You don't have to convince the people around you that nothing's up if you just never slink around acting suspiciously and dropping hints in the first place. Keeping a secret is every bit as simple as just not mentioning it. 

Of course for someone like Rachel, who's used to demanding attention with every waking breath, that's a lot to ask. Kurt, though...right up through sophomore year of high school, there was all of one person in his entire life who actually wanted to hear anything he had to say. It's the sort of thing that taught Rachel to be even louder, but mostly, it taught Kurt how to shut up, at least about the important things. No need to bring something up at all, if it's only going to be used against you. No need to even bother. 

Just not saying things is a lifetime sort of habit which Dave Karofsky should really be incredibly grateful for, because if he'd tried to kiss _Rachel Berry_ in that locker room—well, it wouldn't have needed to be a secret anyway, but the entire school would have known about it. Kurt mostly doesn't think about it any more. There's nobody he'd ever mention it to besides Blaine, and they have more important things to discuss. 

They talk about Blaine's secrets instead, sometimes, which are even easier to avoid casually slipping into conversation. It doesn't exactly come up; “oh, and my best friend's also a wizard” isn't really an expected response to, “please pass the butter for my toast.” 

Mostly, they just talk about all the same things they ever did before. It's easy. Movie Musical Monday settles back into comfortable routine, and Lost DVDs after homework sessions to cram for their weekly history quizzes on Wednesdays, and Warblers' Thursday takeout night to celebrate almost the end of the week and avoid mystery leftovers stew in the cafeteria. Blaine was the one who pulled Kurt into the rhythms of Dalton life in the first place. They're familiar, now, like the sometime stillness of Kurt's own tongue. 

That's the real reason he doesn't tell anybody at McKinley about Sam, not any deep inner trustworthiness. It doesn't come up, and anyway, Sam asks him not to. It's not like it hurts Kurt any to file Sam's living conditions away in the back of his head, along with all the other things he never bothers to say. 

Kurt and Blaine find out about Sam on a Thursday, an hour after a heated argument over several pizzerias' home-baked crusts narrowly misses developing into an all-out brawl. David scowls in the corner behind the couch where Nick is sulking over his D'Amato's and his bruised elbow, while Thad spouts off ineffectually about Giamatti's and Wes fends off half the group with his gavel so Trent can dial Papa Murphy's, all the way in Bellefontaine. Even Blaine smirks near the piano when Trent's voice goes all high and awkward over delivery area, until Wes tells him to offer them an extra 30% as an out-of-range delivery fee. 30% on a Warblers'-sized pizza order is a sizeable chunk of money. 

If anyone else had gone down to get the pizzas, it would have been a total non-event, but the Warblers unanimously elected Kurt for his unsportsmanlike behavior of standing to one side and examining his nails for the whole argument, and Blaine volunteered to help him carry without being asked. If anyone else from the New Directions had seen Sam in the yellow and green delivery uniform, everyone else in the school would have known by Friday at lunch. 

Kurt just signs Wes's name on the receipt and, with raised eyebrows, asks Sam not to report him for credit card fraud. Wes will forgive him for the size of the tip. 

Sam mumbles something too fast to hear, piles the entire stack of pizzas in Blaine's arms, and flees. Kurt stares after him, then takes the top three boxes and helps Blaine carry them back to the study room, and doesn't mention the encounter to Mercedes over IM later that night, or to Rachel or Tina by text the next day. 

On Saturday Sam finds him, casually slinking by the garage that afternoon when Finn's car is conspicuous in its absence. Kurt wipes his hands off carefully and slips out front to talk to him. He's off-the-books labor and his dad pays him by the hour; he can get away with an unannounced ten minute break. 

“You didn't tell anyone about Thursday night,” is the first thing out of Sam's mouth. Kurt just inspects his cuticles for stray grease and leans against the brick wall around the left side of the shop, the one away from the street. 

“It's not actually any of my business,” he says casually. “Not everyone who's ever been in New Directions is an incurable gossip.” 

“Yeah, well, thanks.” Sam is awkward, fidgety. His hair's outgrowing its Justin Bieber look and heading for all-out indie rocker shag. It's working for him, so that's one good thing to come out of this. Bieber isn't a good look for anybody. 

“It's just for a while, you know?” Sam is saying, toeing one foot against the ground and looking anywhere but Kurt. “Just until my dad finds another job and we get back up on our feet. It's fine, I just don't need the whole school getting involved in it, you know?” 

Kurt knows. Kurt's been that kind of 'fine'. In retrospect even if anybody in New Directions _had_ tried to push him about it he would have refused to say anything, because of habit, because how could they understand, because once you've learned to keep your own secrets it's hard to learn to tell them again. He probably shouldn't even ask, but Sam's not Kurt. Before whatever's going on here, Kurt would have said that Sam was no better at keeping a secret than anybody else in New Directions. 

“Of course,” Kurt says mildly, and then hesitates, and then plunges on ahead. “Do you want to talk about it?” 

Sam hesitates, darts a glance actually at Kurt's face, and goes back to studying the wall. “My dad's been saying we might lose the house,” he says. “We haven't said anything to Steve and Stacy yet. I just...” 

“I'm sorry,” says Kurt, and doesn't bother to promise Sam it won't happen. He hasn't tried reassuring Blaine that any of his old friends are probably still alive, either. Kurt doesn't like to make promises he has no power to keep. 

“I don't even know where we'd _go_.” Sam bursts out. Kurt leans more comfortably back against the wall and mentally apologizes to his dad for how long this break is going to be. 

It seems like that's all Kurt's been doing lately, _listening_ , keeping quiet and letting other people spill their innermost secrets. All year, ever since his dad's coma—from lady chats with Finn to the thing with Jeremiah, the entire life and times of Harry fucking Potter, and now this—he's been all ears and no action. What is there to be _done_? 

He doesn't bother to tell Blaine about Sam. He makes a casserole that weekend, the kind that'll freeze well and feed a family of five for days, and brings it over to the Evans house. Sam answers the door with the closest thing to a glare Kurt's ever seen on his face. He starts to say about ten different things all at once, but before he can figure out which one to go with his little sister appears around his legs and that's the end of that. 

Sometimes, when Kurt and Blaine are hanging out alone in one of their rooms and Ian or Zach are sure to be gone for a while, Blaine talks about the nightmares he's still not quite admitting he still has. It's not often, but it's enough that Kurt's started having recurring dreams about giant snakes turning people to stone. Kurt doesn't have anything to say back—Blaine was already there for the worst weeks of his life, and anyway, Kurt's life couldn't have ever _really_ been in danger. Not really. Not like evil wizard overlords and giant snakes. 

Kurt delivers three more weekend casseroles to the Evanses, Sam's eyes getting increasingly tighter each time, before he gets a text message on a Wednesday night telling him not to bother any more. That weekend he brings a giant tin of oatmeal cookies and homemade granola bars by a sketchy motel on the south side of town instead. 

The hems of Stevie's pants are about an inch or two above his ankles. Kurt drives back to the house already thinking about hand-me-downs and the back racks of his wardrobe. 

 

 

Blaine doesn't come home with Kurt for the weekend again until about a month after Sectionals. Kurt is ready for it to be awkward, confusing. He's even ready for it to be just as normal as so many of their other interactions have gotten lately; Blaine in public is the exact same person Kurt ever knew, and Blaine in private is mostly just a little more open about things, a little bit quieter, and never stumbles over his tongue before he answers a basic question on his past any more.

He doesn't actually expect to find himself in a situation where he's more afraid for Dave Karofsky's continued survival than his own. 

The last time Blaine had come to McKinley High, Kurt had been shaken, shaking, desperate for something to grab onto and not too terribly observant about what that was. Blaine had been poised, perfect, confident, and right up until the very moment he tried to shove Karofsky in the chest Kurt hadn't believed Blaine would so much as step on a cockroach, much less hit an actual human. 

It hadn't occurred to Kurt that Karofsky would be here tonight. He'd filed away all Blaine's stories about the fistfights he'd gotten into—and lost—at his last school. He was fifteen and his whole world had just been taken away, who wouldn't want to hurt somebody as badly as they were hurting? But that's all gone now. Blaine Anderson is his own, settled person, and Kurt hadn't thought anything else about it. 

And then this red-clad wall of muscle appeared from nowhere, and now, barely two lines later, Blaine is _throwing_ himself at him, and Kurt should be trying to break this up. He should be trying to save Blaine from being pounded into the tile floor, but the only thing racing through his head is the giant snake he dreamed about again last night, and how that story ended when Blaine told it, with a sword and a wash of blood and he'd been _twelve years old_.

Kurt should break in, he should stop all of this, but if he doesn't...if Blaine just...if Karofsky... 

Here, in the safe, normal, muggle world, Kurt had never really been in real danger. Not in Lima, Ohio. Before Karofsky, Kurt had never believed the jocks would really hurt him, not seriously, not more than a few broken bones, at least. Broken bones heal, but you never go farther than that. People just _don't_ , not real people, not even Neanderthal jocks with something to prove. But Blaine is going after Karofsky like he doesn't know that rule, and he's known people were trying to literally kill him since he was eleven years old.

Blaine had said, at one point, that Tilda keeps guns in the apartment but he doesn't know where they are. Kurt's not sure what happened to that extra wand. 

Kurt's not supposed to be scared of Blaine, and he's not, at least not for himself, but suddenly he finds himself imagining what would happen if he came back to McKinley and Karofsky went after him again. It's the first time his dad's reaction isn't the one he's most worried about. 

If 'worried' is the right word, but he still hasn't stepped forward to break things up. If Blaine is dangerous, then Kurt could just stand here. Kurt could just let him... 

Then Santana's pushing past him and shoving the two of them apart, glaring at everybody, breaking it up like Kurt should have been doing himself. She storms in like she's too fierce for anything in the world to stop her, and Karofsky drops his hands and doesn't try. 

Blaine pulls back to Santana's left, lets her sneer at Karofsky with all the vicious disdain of the biggest cutthroat bitch in school. Kurt watches him out of the corner of his eye, straightening the cuffs on his sleeves, composing himself. He's Blaine again, all Blaine, but Blaine's not all he ever was and Kurt has to stop forgetting that. 

This might all be less confusing if he wasn't finding himself sort of liking the violent, protective side of Harry Potter. 

“So here's what's gonna go down,” says Santana. “Two choices. You stay here and I can crack one of your nuts, right or left, that's your choice, or you walk away, and live to be a douchebag another day.” Someday, Kurt wants to be as intimidating as Santana, if he can manage it without being quite so psychotic. “Oh, and also? I have razorblades hidden in my hair.” Um. Make that a lot less psychotic. 

 

 

The show would be fantastic, if the audience wasn't so completely horrible, and Kurt mostly sits in his seat and remembers all the reasons why he hates McKinley and everything it stands for. Blaine sits in his seat and simmers. 

He's dangerous. He snarls at Mr. Ryerson and he's faced some kind of werewolves while traveling through time, Harry Potter has always been a dangerous human being. Kurt puts one hand over his wrist on the arm rest, never mind what Azimio would do if he saw them, and holds Blaine's hand there steady. 

Obviously they don't talk during the performances, that would be unspeakably rude, and afterwards they have to go straight to the choir room to congratulate the New Directions on a magnificent recovery from yet another of McKinley's occasionally metaphorical slushies to the face. Kurt sticks close to Blaine the whole time, and is glad of it when Mr. Ryerson walks in and he has to grab for Blaine's wrist to stop him saying something or worse. 

They don't talk on the drive home because Finn is in the car, and then the radio starts up playing Journey and they _have_ to sing along for that, and they don't talk when they get back to the Hummel-Hudson house because...because Kurt has no idea how to bring it up and Blaine doesn't show any signs of wanting to talk about it anyway, which is the real reason they've been avoiding the subject of the confrontation ever since it happened. They stay up with an old copy of Casablanca for a while, while Finn goes up to his room to shoot zombies on his computer or something, and spend the whole time quoting along with the lines at random intervals. Then Blaine sets up on the couch for the night, and Kurt goes up to his bedroom alone. 

Blaine, who is Harry, who grew up in England with kind of abusive relatives and secret magic powers and can't ever talk about any of it, held Kurt's hand right back every time Kurt grabbed to keep him steady tonight. Blaine knows all the dialogue to Casablanca even though the first time he saw it was only a few years ago. Blaine wanted to kiss him at Pavarotti's funeral, which has to be at least as big an error in judgment or timing as serenading some guy at work when he isn't even supposed to be out, though Kurt still questions just how successful Jeremiah thought he was being with that. 

He's Blaine, and also Harry, and Kurt had been letting himself forget that sometimes that means a little unexploded violence. There's just so many different things, and it's all so _confusing_. 

Blaine enjoyed Mercedes' performance. He had tears in the corners of his eyes by the end. Blaine went after Karofsky as much for himself as to protect Kurt. 

Kurt is still just about exactly as in love with him as he was before Spring Break, it's just gotten so scary and complicated and hard to deal with. He doesn't know what he wants to do yet. He doesn't know.

He finishes his skincare routine with meditative thoroughness, not letting his mind stray too far from the cool of the creams and the sweep of the cotton pad across his face, and goes to bed. 

 

 

Four days later, his father calls him at school to say that Dave Karofsky wants to set up a meeting. Kurt doesn't nearly drop the phone; instead, his grip on it tightens so hard the plastic squeaks. 

“Why?” he asks, backing up against the wall of the hallway as much so he stays standing as in hopes that no passing teacher will need to take this exact minute to reinforce the no-cellphones rule. 

“He wants to apologize,” Burt says, heavy with skepticism. “Now, I gotta be honest with you, Kurt, I don't really know what brought all this on. All I know is what that useless excuse for a principal over at that school told me. If you don't want to do this, I'll call him back right now and tell him no way, d'you understand? This is your decision.” 

Kurt swallows, and remembers the tenseness of a throat too frozen in fear to swallow at all, the constant paranoia, the terror. It's not _like_ fighting a wizarding war, he reminds himself. Blaine would go back to England if he could in a heartbeat. There's absolutely no reason why Kurt can't at least sit in a room full of perfectly responsible adult authority figures and start trying to get over it. If he's this scared, he obviously needs to. 

“It's fine,” Kurt says, eyes flickering back and forth across the hallway for any oncoming teachers. “Can it be Friday? I've got a test tomorrow afternoon.” 

“Kurt, are you sure--” 

“I'm sure, Dad,” Kurt says, briskly enough that maybe it doesn't sound entirely forced. “I've got to go, I've got class in a minute. I love you.” 

“Love you, kid,” his dad says gruffly, and Kurt hits the 'END CALL' button before he can say anything more. 

Blaine spots the look on Kurt's face the moment he slides into his seat in trigonometry, and leans over with a concerned frown when Mr. Beedler looks away to find his notes for today's class. “Is everything okay?” he asks lowly. 

“I'll tell you later,” Kurt whispers back, and shoves Blaine back upright just in time for the starting bell to ring. 

'Later' ends up meaning that evening, in Kurt's room with the door closed, sitting cross-legged at opposite ends of Kurt's dorm bed. Kurt lays out his trepidations, one by one, and Blaine smiles one of the least convincing smiles Kurt's seen since they've known each other. 

“But that's great, Kurt,” he says, with enough fake enthusiasm that Kurt almost believes him for a second. “That's exactly what you wanted, isn't it? To be able to go back to McKinley, be with your friends? You could even go to New York with the New Directions. It's perfect.” And Blaine smiles hard enough that he might even fool some random passer-by who doesn't know him as well as Kurt does, but nobody in Ohio knows Blaine like Kurt. Kurt's met Harry Potter. He can tell when Blaine's faking enthusiasm. 

He can tell when Blaine thinks it's for Kurt's own good, too, so he doesn't say anything. He just notices, and lets noticing settle in with all the other things he has to consider this week, from the appropriate outfit to wear when walking back through McKinley's doors to just how frightened he ought to be when he shows up. 

Kurt ends up striding back through the doors at McKinley, perfectly composed into appearing at least a quarter as frightened as he actually is and no more than a fraction more than he actually wants to be. It's halfway through sixth period. The halls are largely empty. It's easy to be brave when nobody is here to disrupt his aplomb, but he will take it. 

Dave Karofsky is sitting next to his father, fidgeting and sullen and somehow small with it, on the couch in Figgins' office. Kurt sits down across from him and crosses his legs as primly and precisely as he can. His father settles in nearby. 

“So, we are all here because David Karofsky and Mr. Paul Karofsky have something they wish to say to the Hummel family,” Figgins drones. Mr. Schuester smiles on encouragingly. Kurt folds his hands in his lap and waits.

“Well, let's hear it,” says Burt, and Karofsky clears his throat awkwardly. 

“I just wanted to say, Kurt,” he says, and glances down; his father nudges him on, “that I'm really sorry I was such a jerk to you, and I hope you'll consider coming back to McKinley.” He recites it like a prepared speech, then clams up completely. That's when his dad, the oh-so- _reasonable_ Mr. Karofsky, starts explaining all of what _David_ means by “sorry”, and Kurt stops listening. Instead, he watches David. And waits. 

There's only one person in this room who's ever really hurt him, physically, along with three different adults who never tried or managed to stop it. Kurt's dad is on his side, of course he is—Kurt's dad would just as soon see him safely back to Dalton before putting him at the slightest risk back at McKinley again. Kurt won't be paying much attention to the promises of anybody other than Dave Karofsky himself today.

For now, he's sitting on the couch next to his father, offering the occasional tentative comment or defense while the adults argue around them about a decision Kurt is nowhere near making yet. Not until he knows just a few things. 

Karofsky fidgets; he's folded himself into the corner of the couch as much as possible, not that he really gets any smaller. It's a far cry from the violent jock of just a week ago, and a week doesn't really seem like enough time to have wrought this kind of change, but what does Kurt know? Not enough, yet. 

“Kurt, what do you think?” his dad asks, and Kurt tunes back in on the conversation around him, though he doesn't take his eyes off Karofsky for a second. 

“I'd like to speak with David alone, please,” he says, and it's the first thing he's said since they've walked in the door, so they let him, eventually. Kurt knows they're watching through the glass, and that's just fine. He's grown curiously unafraid since they sat down in here, something about Karofsky's body language doesn't quite add up and it makes Kurt feel oddly in-control, but that doesn't mean he's stupid. He'll take an extra two or three sets of semi-authoritative eyes on them, so long as nobody else is listening. 

“What's your angle?” Kurt asks flatly, once the door is safely closed. 

“What are you talking about?” Karofsky asks, and Kurt rolls his eyes. 

“I _know_ , remember? You're so closeted you tried to rip my best friend's face off last week just for the crime of standing in the same building with you, so what changed?” 

Karofsky looks torn for a second, suspended and conflicted and pained every which way. Then he crumbles like a brick wall. 

“It was Santana's idea,” he says. “She found out, and she's blackmailing me into this so we can run for Prom King and Queen.” 

Kurt's eyebrows rise, but otherwise he doesn't shift position. Something about this whole situation feels good. There's a low buzz of tension in the room, nothing about this is quite _calm_ , but he has so much more power than the last time he sat across this room from David Karofsky. It's sick, enjoying watching somebody else brought low like this, and if Santana had actually outed him Kurt would probably be horrified to find himself on Karofsky's side, but as it is... 

“That's Machiavellian,” he says. “I don't know whether to be appalled or slightly impressed.” 

“So you'll come back?” Karofsky asks hopefully. 

“What's in this for her?” Kurt asks. “Reforming the school's biggest bully I can see, but most of McKinley was just as glad to see the back of me as you were.” 

“She says it'll show a good-faith effort to make amends,” Karofsky recites, and Kurt snorts. 

So, Santana actually _likes_ him. Kurt's had his suspicions. Much as he might disapprove of her methods, it's nice to have friends who care about him like this. Kurt really has more friends than he ever expected he could, in high school. 

Including the ones that don't go to McKinley. “So what happens if I say no?” Kurt asks.

“What? No, you've got to come back,” Karofsky says, instantly leaning forward with a sort of oddly desperate look on his face. “We made the school safe for you, so now—” 

“I don't think you're really in any place to dictate terms to me,” Kurt says, and enjoys, just a little, just for a second, the flinch on Karofsky's face. Then he softens. “I'll think about it. And I'll speak with Santana if I decide not to. That's all I can promise for now.” 

 

 

In the car on the way home, Kurt tilts his head and looks at his father in profile, worries the strap of his bag between the fingers of his right hand.

“Dad?” he says finally, into the silence. “How much is Dalton costing, exactly?” 

“Not enough to pull you out of there if you think for one second you won't be safe back at that school,” Burt answers instantly. He glances to the right. “Don't even think about lying about something like that, Kurt. We have the money.” 

“I think I would be,” Kurt says, turning to stare out the window. “I know what's going on inside his head, now. He'd leave me alone.” 

Burt snorts, flicks his indicator on. “Don't sound so thrilled, buddy.” 

“It's nothing,” says Kurt. “It's great.” 

“What, you don't want to go back now?” asks his dad. Kurt says nothing, and Burt glances over again as he pulls into the cul-de-sac. “You want to stay at Dalton.” 

“It's nothing, Dad. McKinley is fine. I got by there for the first two and a half years.” And if that comes out a little more bitter than he meant it to, there's no softening it now. 

Burt pulls into the driveway and cuts the ignition, but doesn't get out of the car. “Listen, Kurt. If you want to stay at Dalton—for any reason, I don't just mean that caveman of a football player and that completely incompetent principal—if you want to stay there, even just to finish out the year, you talk to me. We'll make it work.” 

It's a blessing he hadn't realized he'd needed to go ahead with something Kurt doesn't even know if he wants. He nods, unclicks his seatbelt, and only glances back over his shoulder when he goes to open the door. 

“I don't know yet,” he says. “Is that okay?” 

Burt nods. “Take all the time you need,” he says, and then lets Kurt flee for the so-much-less-confusing privacy of his own room. 

 

That night Puck texts him four times in the middle of family dinner to help plan a massive flash mob in the Lima mall to keep Rachel from getting a nose job. Finn knocks the gravy boat of homemade salad dressing over onto the pan of lasagna, so nobody gets seconds and they end up popping a huge pot of lightly-salted unbuttered popcorn to go with the night's movie. It's Finn's turn to choose, so they end up in front of some dimly-lit gothic urban-vampires-of-the-late-nineties movie with all the wooden dialogue of the LA season of Project Runway, and all the fashion sensibilities of _The Matrix_.

Monday morning, he leaves early, and gets back to campus almost an hour before his first class. Zach will still be asleep, but Blaine always wakes up early, and Kurt thinks Ian might be one of those die-hard morning bacon and hash browns people, which gives him a little time. 

He'd texted with Blaine a little over the weekend, but they hadn't called, and now Kurt is unaccountably nervous. He probably shouldn't be doing this, for any number of reasons, but the two reasons he does have are so big. There's Harry, who never had any real family worthy of the name, and there's Blaine, who Kurt knows has never really had anybody at all. Not like this. 

He takes the stairs up to the fifth floor at a quick trot, and raps at the door to room number 512 with a little too much energy for seven in the morning. He has a regular drip from the Lima Bean in one hand; he finished the extra-large, extra shot nonfat mocha in the car. 

“Hello?” Blaine says a little dazedly, opening the door to reveal red striped pyjamas and already-gelled hair. Kurt thrusts the coffee at him. 

“Can I come in?” he asks. Blaine steps to the side to make room. Kurt waits while Blaine takes a few sips of his coffee. This will work better if they're both coherent. 

“Kurt, what's wrong?” Blaine asks. Kurt paces nervously across the room towards the window, then turns around, wringing his hands together. 

“Why did you ask to kiss me at Pavarotti's funeral?” he asks instead. Blaine blinks; it really is too early in the morning for Kurt to be doing this, but it has to be _now_ , before he loses his nerve completely. 

“Because you're amazing,” Blaine says simply. “You're...Kurt, you're not like anyone I've ever met. You make me feel things that...” He trails off, and Kurt takes a step forward, then another step. 

“Do you still want to?” Kurt asks, trying to keep his voice steady even if his hands aren't. 

“What...Kurt?” Blaine asks quietly, and when Kurt takes one more tiny step forward, Blaine raises a hand to touch his shoulder. 

“I'd like you to,” says Kurt, and control or not, his voice has gone adrenaline-quavery now, too. “If you still—” _want to_ , Kurt means to say, but the rest of the sentence is lost in the softness and heat of Blaine's mouth against his, Blaine's palm against Kurt's cheek, and oh, _oh_ , it's nothing like Karofsky at all. 

Kurt's hand is cradling Blaine's face, holding Blaine's head close. Kurt doesn't know how it got there but it feels like it belongs, so there his hand can stay, even as their lips slowly pull apart. 

“Wow,” Blaine says awkwardly, ducking his head but not pulling away. “I should put some clothes on...” 

“I'm not going back to McKinley,” Kurt says abruptly. “I talked it over with my dad yesterday, after we invaded the atrium of the mall with disco house music and a hundred unpaid extras. If I stay here, I get to keep having all that and avoid the actual tearful meltdowns about plastic surgery and cheating girlfriends.” 

“But Kurt, you love—” 

“My wardrobe? It looks better when it hasn't been recently covered in slushie,” Kurt says lightly. 

“I thought this...” Blaine gestures between the two of them. “I thought you were saying goodbye.” 

He sounds just short of broken, a step and a half away from letting himself be hopeful, which cements in Kurt's mind that this was the right decision no matter what else may come. Kurt steps forward to bridge the distance between them, wrapping his arms as tightly around his friend, his _best_ friend, his _boy_ friend, as he can. 

“I'll never say goodbye to you,” he promises. Rival show choirs and evil wizards can go to hell. Kurt's finally found somebody who understands _him_ just as well as Kurt understands Blaine back, and he's not _ever_ letting go. 

 

Spring finally starts to warm up, so instead of cold and wet and muddy everywhere, it's almost seventy and thunderstormy but otherwise slightly less muddy, and also _wonderful_. Kurt usually hates this point of spring, where it's still sloppy enough to ruin a good pair of boots but starting to get inappropriate to accessorize with a good scarf. He can't bring himself to care, this year.

Blaine doesn't bring Kurt back to Cincinnati, but he'll describe little pieces of things with no context sometimes, out of nowhere; he tells Kurt about Chocolate Frogs and Every Flavor jelly beans, both of which sound disgusting, about potions that can change your shape and potions that can let you walk through fire, about the Society for the Promotion of Elvish Welfare. He tells stories the way Kurt thinks he might someday, when he makes it out of Lima, if the warm glow of nostalgia lets him remember all the completely inappropriate school plays and pot cupcake bake sales and the thrill of competition, without the overhanging gloom of everything else about Lima at all. Kurt has a pretty good idea of what overhanging gloom makes Blaine cut his stories off just as they get exciting, and he doesn't push it, for now.

Prom is coming, at McKinley. Besides the new mess with Sam, it's all Kurt hears about these days. Quinn has Finn reporting for suit fittings on a strict schedule, Mercedes and Rachel _still_ don't have dates, apparently Brittany and Artie got into a screaming match in the middle of the hallway and so now neither do they, and Santana and Karofsky are campaigning so hard on their 'law and order candidate' ticket that Kurt thinks slushie sales in the McKinley cafeteria must have dropped by 90% in the past two weeks.

Dalton has a spring semiformal and awards banquet that they combine with Crawford, a week after McKinley's prom. Kurt's going to go, of course, in full Dalton uniform to perform with the Warblers during dinner while his dad makes awkward smalltalk with the other parents and applauds politely for the presentation of honors. There will be music, and not a person in the room will open their mouth to object to Kurt taking his boyfriend by the hand and leading him into a slow dance. It's not really the same, of course, but Blaine apparently has an awkward history with school dances, so maybe it doesn't matter so much.

Kurt doesn't do anything like normal teenagers. That's been fairly well established by now. Given the sorts of secrets between them, why would he ever expect his and Blaine's relationship to be any different?

He goes on call the weekend before prom as a final checker and approver of dresses, gets Mercedes into something flatteringly purple and buys Santana's forgiveness for his continued stay at Dalton by finding her the perfect one-of-a-kind slinky red dress. He even works a little of his own well-obviously-it's-not- _real_ -magic for Lauren Zizes, even though they've barely exchanged five words and he's not altogether clear on how she and Puck ended up together in the first place.

Women's prom fashions are more exciting than men's, anyway. If Kurt _had_ been going to a prom of his own, heaven only knows how he'd have come up with something suitably formal and appropriately spectacular. Probably he's better off spending the weekend with Blaine working his way through every high-end discount store along the I-75 between Lima and Cincinnati. He'll have more to show for it come Monday morning, at least.

 

 

“Dad.” Kurt has this conversation over the phone. His dad will still know exactly which parts he's fudging the truth around, but Kurt won't get called out on them this way. It's just easier.

“Can Blaine come for family dinner this Friday?” he asks. It's happened a dozen times, before and after they started dating; this isn't the new part.

“Yeah, sure thing,” his dad says. Something clangs in the background—a dropped wrench, Kurt assesses. “You want someone up here to keep you company for all the whole prom madness? Don't forget, Carole and I are both driving down for your thing next weekend.”

“Yes, I need to make sure she knows she can't wear the teal dress with the green-and-silver earrings again,” says Kurt, already mentally sorting through his stepmother's wardrobe. “I'll find her something Friday night.”

“Oh yeah? So what's your plan for Saturday?” Burt Hummel doesn't miss much. Kurt fidgets a little with the hem of his blazer; Blaine should be back to the dorm room with study snacks any minute.

“I was thinking, maybe Blaine and I should get out of the way of the whole prom, dance, chaos, thing,” Kurt says casually. “His sister's been wanting to see him home, and she'll be around this weekend, so we thought maybe we would just drive down to Cincinnati on Saturday and stay the night there.”

“Oh, yeah? His sister okay with you tagging along on their family time like that?”

“She said it was fine.” Kurt was never one to cross his fingers during a lie. Tilda _will_ say it's fine, if Kurt's dad actually calls her, and that's what counts. “I'll stay on the couch,” he adds. Kurt could claim to be sleeping in the non-existent guest room for all he's likely to get caught out on it. He can't see Tilda _ever_ letting another person into the ultra-high-security world of a tiny two-room apartment in a complex in midtown Cincinnati.

“That sounds fine, Kurt,” Burt says, and if Kurt knows it's half out of pity, at least he doesn't have to see it on his dad's face.

Blaine lets himself back into the room then, with such excellent timing that Kurt can't help but wonder if he's found some way to eavesdrop incredibly effectively from the hallway, but no matter; it gives Kurt an excuse to end this conversation before it goes anywhere uncomfortable. He'll call his dad again later tonight to catch up with everything else that's happened today, just like every Tuesday and Thursday afternoon.

“I have to go,” Kurt says. “Calculus study group.”

“All right, Kurt, knock 'em dead. Talk to you later.”

“Love you, Dad,” Kurt says.

 

 

It's not that Kurt doesn't want to be anywhere near Lima on prom night. It's the fact that he's been meaning to get back down to the massive outlet mall in Jefferson for months, and there won't be any full-family obligations this weekend to prevent him. Plus they'll pass half a dozen department stores and shopping complexes on their way down, and Dayton may be a pit but it has _multiple_ malls that put Lima's to shame.

A full day of shopping his way down what may sadly qualify as the _best_ of what western Ohio has to offer, versus waking up to make breakfast for Finn's likely-hungover face on Sunday, listening to him ramble on about Quinn all morning? Kurt and Blaine will load up the car.

Blaine, as always, is a perfect house guest. He chops carrots and bell peppers without complaint, and sets up his pillow and blankets on the downstairs couch with every evidence of being perfectly happy to have to sleep on a sofa tonight. Kurt wonders, not for the first time, just how many winter breaks and summer vacations Harry spent away from school at a friend's house, just to avoid being home.

After dinner they watch _Pretty In Pink_ because somehow Finn's managed to escape seeing it for this long, and it was Carole's favorite when she was in high school. Kurt curls into Blaine's side. He's not missing anything. Staying away from McKinley is nothing compared to what Blaine's lost. Kurt has everything he needs right here.

 

 

The tension that Kurt refuses to admit has settled like an iron band over his shoulders fades slowly over the course of the day. They skip the sketchy anti-abortion thrift store in Sidney and detour twenty minutes out of their way to a tiny vintage shop in Versailles, where Kurt finds two gorgeous hats and tries to sell Blaine on the old-fashioned charm of bow ties.

Driving south along the Ohio highway, if Kurt ignores the rolling terrain and just watches the names on the road signs, he can almost pretend he's going somewhere better-than-here. Out of Versailles they drive through Russia on the way to Troy, past signs on the turnoffs for Verona and London. Blaine takes over the iPod playlist somewhere around the signs for St. Paris, and they sing the 'Les Miserables' soundtrack from one end to the other, before switching it over to 'The Scarlet Pimpernel'.

They trade off driving when they stop in Dayton, after a frustrating search through four different shoe stores fails to turn up anything to match the much-too-expensive pair of designer black-heeled red boots Kurt spotted last week online. It's past two by the time they finally make it to Jeffersonville, tired and, at least in Blaine's case, obviously ready for a break.

“Food court?” Kurt says, a small peace offering for the way they strode out of the Greene Town Center only just in time to prevent Kurt from unleashing the sharpest edge of his tongue on a pair of seriously incompetent salesladies. Blaine smiles sideways and holds his hand out.

“Come on,” he says, while Kurt watches his hand like it might possibly turn out to be a live snake. “I'll buy you a veggie sub.”

“We're in public,” Kurt blurts out, and Blaine's brow furrows before the corners of his mouth droop in understanding. And that's _just_ what Kurt needs, he's been in an off mood all day, he shouldn't be taking it out on his boyfriend. He _has_ a boyfriend, that should be enough, and that boyfriend has seen much scarier things than an outlet mall in the middle of Ohio, and now Kurt's snapping at him for daring to actually try to show affection in a way Kurt has always wanted. Kurt doesn't even have time to _think_ about it; he grabs for Blaine's hand before Blaine can pull it all the way back, and holds on tight.

“It's fine,” Kurt says, meeting Blaine's eyes and trying to relax them both with nothing but force of will. “Let's go get lunch.”

 

 

There are eyes on them in the food court, Kurt can feel them, as he and Blaine bend over a mall map to plan out their attack route, and Kurt carefully picks the canned black olives off of his veggie sub, and Blaine eats them, one by one, off of the paper of Kurt's sandwich wrapper. It doesn't matter. It's just eyes, just like every other day at McKinley. A pair of eyes never hurt anybody.

“So are we going to see Tilda at all tonight, or is she off tracking evildoers in the wilds of Alaska?” Kurt asks, toying with the straw of his diet soda.

“I honestly still don't know,” Blaine admits, and steals another olive. “I haven't talked to her since Monday. Why?”

“I'm still a little afraid she's going to...I don't know. Turn me into a newt,” Kurt says. Blaine grins down at the table.

“She likes you,” he promises. “I'll protect you if I have to.”

“My knight in shining armor,” Kurt says, with more affection than sarcasm.

“Will you settle for a sweater and a bow-tie?” Blaine asks, and Kurt laughs, and _let_ people stare. This is theirs, and no one can touch that. 

“So,” says Kurt, turning back to their game plan. “Shall we get to it?”

“Banana Republic, Calvin Klein, Bath and Body Works?” Blaine lists with a smile. Kurt adds his empty sandwich wrapper to their garbage tray, and folds the map up neatly to fit in his satchel.

“That's the plan,” he agrees cheerfully, until Blaine carries their tray to the garbage and then keeps right on going, towards the rest of the mall. “ _Blaine_. I didn't think I needed to clarify, it's _wash our hands_ , Banana Republic, Calvin Klein, Bath and Body Works.” Blaine has the good grace to look abashed, at least, and he changes course immediately back towards Kurt. “I never thought I'd say this, but you're almost as bad as Finn sometimes,” Kurt says. “Greasy fingerprints and unpaid merchandise never mix.”

“Wow, as bad as Finn, huh?” Blaine asks, but luckily he seems more amused than insulted by the comparison. “Guess I'll have to step up my game, then.” And he offers Kurt his elbow like an old-fashioned gentleman, completely ridiculous given that they're just crossing a noisy mall food court, not making a grand entrance at, say, prom. Greasy fingertips or not, Kurt takes it.

The bathroom is big, and empty when they walk in, down a short hallway between an empty food court stall and behind the Sunglasses Hut. Apparently now that Kurt's reminded him, Blaine needs to take advantage of their little pit stop, so Kurt washes his hands and then examines the effectiveness of his moisturizer routine in the mirror while he waits. He very deliberately keeps his eyes focused on his own complexion, and not the reflection of Blaine's back, over behind Kurt and to the left. They're the only people in the bathroom, but...still.

The door swings open, and then halfway closed until it gets caught and pushed open again, then a third time. Kurt ignores them. He's got better things to do today than worry about a trio of Neanderthal frat boy college jocks who only came to the mall to hit on girls. Besides, Kurt learned a long time ago not to glance at anybody else in the men's bathroom. It can end ( _locker checks dumpster tosses elbows and trips and bright blue slushies_ ) badly.

This isn't McKinley. Even McKinley wasn't as dangerous as all that. Nobody ever ( _pee balloons lawn furniture shoves slams bruises bumps swirlies the flagpole the--_ ) really _actually hurt him_ at McKinley. Even Karofsky. All he did was loom, and shove, and say a few things, but he never would have done anything, never would have gone through with—

The sound of Blaine doing his zipper up is weirdly loud in the quiet of the men's room. It's echoed a second later by the lock on the door clicking shut.

Kurt is suddenly having an extremely hard time convincing himself that he shouldn't be getting very, very scared right now. Kurt hates 'scared'. It's not productive. There's nothing he can do with it. He's not in _control_ , and that's not acceptable, and.

And he's locked in a bathroom in Jeffersonville, Ohio with his boyfriend and three guys who look like they must have just missed getting recruited for football at Ohio State and spent the past four or five years drowning their sorrows over that fact in cheap beer and cheaper women. And Kurt is very, very scared.

“Is there a problem here?” Blaine asks, Dalton-pleasantly, and Kurt wants to strangle him except that _strangle_ isn't his favorite word right now.

“Yeah. We've got ourselves a problem,” says one of them, and oh. Kurt had forgotten.

He hears the words, distant noises that convey some meaning or another, but he'd forgotten just how this sort of thing works. Of course the words don't matter. Words don't mean anything, in a situation like this. The frat boy could go spouting off the Declaration of Independence and it wouldn't matter, not when he's standing like that, looming, threatening to overwhelm Kurt just with his sheer _presence_.

Kurt thinks they could do everything that comes next in total silence and it wouldn't make a difference. He shrinks back against the counter and can't think of anything to say that would change one thing, except perhaps to tell Blaine to shut up before he makes it worse.

“You're in our town,” says the frat boy, although if he's actually from Jeffersonville then he and his friends must be wash-out townie nobodies, not that that helps Kurt any. “You're in our mall, perverting our public spaces, and you're in our bathroom, trying to catch a sight of decent guys' dicks when they piss.”

“We're not doing anything to you,” Blaine says slowly and calmly, raising his hands palms-out, and what happened to the Blaine from last month, the one who would take on a guy twice his size with nothing but his own hands and sheer rage? This Blaine is going to get them both killed, if that isn't inevitable by now anyway.

“We're sorry,” Kurt says, before Blaine can get them into any more trouble. He's pressed as far back into the counter as he can go; there's splashed water from around the sink soaking through the back of his shirt. It's cold. “We'll go.”

“And you'll never come back,” says another of the guys agreeably, the short, stocky one with the buzz cut. They've spread out between Blaine and Kurt, meandering casually across the bathroom while Kurt's been keeping very, very still, and the big redhead with the facial hair is half behind Blaine now, out of his line of sight. The first one is too close to Kurt, much too close. Kurt presses backwards harder.

“You've got to learn,” says the first one, and suddenly he has Kurt by the side of the collar, yanking him away from the sinks roughly enough to make Kurt's teeth clack in his skull. “Not to—” The rest of it is cut off by Blaine's lunge.

There's the Blaine from the other week, throwing himself forward with such force that he makes it halfway across the room before the big redhead grabs him from behind. Oh god, Kurt takes it back, he takes it back, one guy's got Blaine up around the shoulders wrestling to pin back his arms and the short one throws a punch right into his unprotected kidneys, Dalton Blaine would be just fine, why did nobody ever teach Blaine how much they _hate_ it when you _fight back_?

Blaine groans and doubles over, then throws his weight forward a second later, trying to yank out of the other guy's grip, gets another fist in his gut for his troubles and Kurt is just standing there. The guy has Kurt by his collar but even if he didn't, Kurt doesn't think he could move a single muscle, not even to breathe. The world's starting to get a little fuzzy around the edges. Oh god, what happens if he passes out?

They're _hurting his boyfriend_ why is Kurt just standing here, why isn't he doing something about it, why is he just letting the hand on his collar yank him up and shake him back and forth, hard like whiplash. “You god damned queers,” says the one that's got him, jabbing a finger into Kurt's chest, right where Karofsky had touched him, right over the heart. “You don't belong around here.”

“You think anyone would notice if they just never crawled out of the bathroom?” asks the one that's got Blaine. Blaine's got blood on his face now, Kurt missed that happening, blood on his face and murder in his eyes but it won't matter if these guys decide to do the actual murdering.

“Probably give us a medal,” says the other one.

“Please,” says Kurt, in the shaky, wavery little voice he hasn't heard come out of his own throat since his father got married.

“Please what?” asks the one holding him, giving Kurt another shake for good measure. “What, you're jealous? You want us to pay attention to you instead?” Then he slams his left fist into Kurt's gut, and _oh_. Kurt hasn't been hit like that in a while. Now he really can't breathe.

“Leave him _alone_ ,” growls Blaine. Kurt gasps for air and looks up just in time to see the air shimmer.

 _Something_ slams into the guy pinning Blaine's arms hard enough to throw him back, and Blaine shoves aside the guy who's been hitting him like the guy is made of cloth and stuffed with cotton. He barrels into the guy holding Kurt, but the thing is, Kurt thinks, through the haziness and fear, the guy lets go and finds himself shoved backwards before Blaine even reaches them.

“Come on,” Blaine says urgently, grabbing Kurt's hand, and the door bursts open when he yanks at it even though Kurt _knows_ it was locked earlier. It's magic, and isn't it nice to have a wizard for a boyfriend, one that's done _so many things_ , one who Kurt got beat up and almost killed just for _existing_ next to him in a mall in Ohio while being _so damn stupid._

Blaine pulls Kurt across the food court and towards the mall exit, but by then Kurt is running on his own power, anywhere that's _away._ The keys are still in Blaine's pocket; he's fumbling them out one-handed, and they _shouldn't still be holding on_ , it's not _safe_ , but Kurt can't even think about working his fingers and his feet at the same time right now and he doesn't dare let go.

(They're not even being chased.)

There's the Navigator. There, striding towards them like the wrath of god, is the most beautiful thing Kurt's ever seen.

“What the hell just happened?” Tilda's got a gun strapped to her belt next to a shiny silver badge and a smear of soot across her cheek, and Kurt doesn't see a wand but he knows it's there.

“I'm sorry,” pants Blaine as they pull to a stop. “I didn't mean to, it just came out. They caught us in the bathroom.”

Tilda looks back and forth between them, glancing over everything, from the blood streaking down from Blaine's nose to Kurt's shiny silver shopping-day vest, to their still-clasped hands. “God, you stupid kids,” she says, and clasps a hand on Blaine's shoulder.

“Okay,” says Tilda. “Get in the car, lock the doors, wait for me while I take care of this. I don't want either of you driving right now.”

She stalks off, an avenging angel in Target-brand jeans. Kurt crawls into the back seat—if Tilda's driving them wherever they're going, one of them will need to move back here anyway—and concentrates on breathing. Blaine knows enough not to try to touch him right now.

After a little while, Blaine extends a hand back between the seats, and Kurt takes it. Otherwise, they sit in silence.

 

 

It should take another hour and a half to get back to Blaine and Tilda's apartment from here, but Tilda does something, Kurt thinks, to cut out a good half of that. He starts seeing signs for Lebanon and Mason and the Cincinnati airport a lot sooner than they should, anyway.

It's too quiet, nobody singing along to _Moulin Rouge_ turned down low, dragging on for too long. Eventually, Kurt clears his throat.

“How did you know where to find us?” he asks diffidently. Tilda glances at him in the rear view mirror, then back to the road.

“Tracking spell,” she says shortly.

“Then why did you Apparate into the parking lot, instead of—”

“Tracking spell on the car,” Tilda cuts Blaine off, making Kurt start. “You were already on the move, and wherever you'd parked it, it was probably farther away from prying eyes in case it was a false alarm.”

“Oh,” says Kurt, and then everybody's quiet again, while Kurt thinks over the implications of Blaine's fake sister guardian having tracking spells on his car as well as just Blaine himself.

Her cell phone is on vibrate, but it's quiet enough for everybody to hear it go off. Tilda pulls it out of her belt holster left-handed and glances down at the display, then swears and flips it open.

“I'm sorry I left you there,” she says. “I told Julius I'm taking the rest of the day off.” A pause; Kurt can hear angry noises coming from the other end. “I don't give a fuck if a flock of Dementors show up dragging Rasputin's reanimated corpse and you have to get St. Georges in accounting to give you a hand. Can you hear by the sound of my voice what kind of day I'm having? Julius authorized it, ask him.” More angry noises. “Goodbye, Murgatroyd,” says Tilda, and snaps the phone shut mid-squawk.

“I'm sorry you had to leave work,” Blaine says. Kurt's sitting behind Tilda, and he can see Blaine through the gap between the seats, looking down at his knees.

“And yet,” starts Tilda in a voice of carefully-controlled anger, and then stops herself.

“And yet what?” asks Kurt. Maybe it's morbid curiosity. Maybe he just wants to get all the anger and terror out into the open, right now, just pile it all on while he can.

“There are two things that have me scared right now,” says Tilda. “And together, they have me very, very scared.”

Kurt doesn't really want to think of Blaine's apparent only guardian being scared.

“You left them locked in the bathroom, by the way,” she says. “It made things easier, so good job with that. I modified their memories, you're welcome.”

“I didn't realize I had,” says Blaine, but Kurt's got a sort of a funny feeling in his stomach.

“So, they don't remember?” he asks. He isn't sure why that doesn't make him happier.

“They remember cornering a couple of scrawny little high school _you-know-whats_ who got fucking lucky and surprised them all by knowing how to throw a good punch,” Tilda says. “They're going to spend months eying their next potential victims in terror that one of them might be hiding a secret proficiency in martial arts.” She pauses to signal and change lanes to get out from behind a particularly slow Volvo; nobody interrupts. “They don't remember your faces.”

“Oh,” says Kurt. “Good.” Tilda cuts back into their original lane in front of the Volvo sharply.

“They do remember,” she says, “that a couple of boys thought it would be a good idea to wander through a mall holding hands and flirting over their lunches like a newlywed couple on the morning after their wedding night, in front of god and country and every homophobe western Ohio might choose to throw their way.” 

“We were just having lunch,” says Blaine.

“You are a stupid, _stupid_ boy,” Tilda bites out. “I've _always_ known you didn't have a single ounce of basic survival instinct, but I had hoped that _one of you_ might have had the basic common sense to not light up a giant, glowing sign over your heads, helpfully reading 'Gaybash Here!'” She punctuates it with a sharp stab at the accelerator that narrowly avoids getting them sideswiped by some soccer mom in a Jeep. Kurt wonders if Tilda's wand can fix paint scratches.

“Kurt didn't do anything wrong!” Blaine argues hotly, and Kurt glances back up at the front seat at the sound of his name in mild surprise. There's been so much noise, and anger, and he can tell in a distant sort of way that he's not even really processing things any more. He wants a hot cup of tea. He wants his dad. “And neither did I. There is no reason we shouldn't be able to go out in public and _get some lunch_ together without—”

“ _And when have I ever given a crap about should?_ ” Tilda demands. Even the squeak of Blaine's shoe fidgeting against the underside of the dashboard falls quiet.

“If you hadn't somehow managed to blast them across the room with wandless magic, they would've had you,” she says. “And if you hadn't used magic, I wouldn't have known to come and save you until they were breaking your bones. Do you think that _any_ amount of whining and wailing and gay rights legislation would have protected you then?”

No, Kurt knows. _Knowing better_ only works in retrospect because you realize just how much you fucked yourself over on your own terms, how much you had in your own power to change if only you hadn't talked yourself out of doing anything about it. It's no good to only start being scared when the lock clicks shut.

“I'm sorry,” says Blaine. “It wasn't Kurt's fault. I was the one that pushed, and I won't do it again. I'm sorry.”

Tilda sighs, indicates, and changes lanes more smoothly this time; they've got to be coming up on their exit. “We need to do something about your magic,” she says. “You're too untrained. A wizard your age should never have been able to do that without a wand, not without so much practice it would make your head spin. We need to rein you in before you get caught by somebody I can't shut up with a few _Obliviates_ and a lot of fudged paperwork.”

“What are you going to do?” Blaine asks, and Tilda swings down the ramp onto the I-75 into Cincinnati.

“I don't know,” she says. “I'll figure it out.”

 

 

There's a stuffiness to the apartment, like nobody's been there in a while, and Kurt wonders blankly where Tilda goes when she's not here. She throws open the balcony doors to let some air in, and Kurt sinks down on the couch.

“I'll make some tea,” says Blaine, and heads for the kitchen; Tilda snorts.

“You're still such a Brit,” she teases. “It's eighty degrees out.”

“Tea fixes everything that can't be fixed by chocolate,” Blaine's voice floats out of the kitchen, and Kurt smiles just a little. He hasn't said much since the car.

It was always easy to keep his feet going and his tongue moving, at school, if he just never stopped. McKinley had no avenging angels, just Kurt trying to get himself through the day. It's too easy to shut down, now, with Tilda striding around like she can take care of everything for him and Kurt almost believing it. The corner of the couch is safe, comfortable, and Blaine's back out in just a couple of minutes balancing two mugs of tea and a slightly dusty bar of Lindt. It's only milk chocolate, not dark, but it looks incredibly appealing anyway.

“Chocolate is also a known cure for the aftereffects of several kinds of dark magic,” Blaine says, laying his prizes out on the coffee table.

“Did you raid my stash?” Tilda demands. She comes out of the bathroom damp-faced, minus the soot from earlier. Kurt's hair must be a mess. Automatically, he reaches into his satchel for his compact mirror to start teasing it back into order.

“I left all your Hershey bars,” says Blaine. “I'll buy you a box of Dairy Milk.”

“Hershey's was good enough for my forefathers,” says Tilda. Blaine sits down on the couch, very close to Kurt.

“You never get used to American chocolate,” he says.

“That's because it's inferior,” Kurt says automatically, nudging a single strand of hair back into place.

“Hey,” says Blaine, nudging him in the side. “How're you holding up?”

Kurt glances away from his mirror. “I'm fine,” he says, and Blaine can stop worrying for nothing. It's not quite a lie, and Kurt will defend it if he has to.

“Good,” says Blaine, and lays one palm on Kurt's closest knee. Tilda healed his bleeding nose in the car, but he's still got drying streaks of red on his face. It's kind of awful to look at.

“You might want to go wash your face,” Kurt suggests, and Blaine's hand flies up to his nose, like he'd completely forgotten. Kurt can't help but smile at his dear, idiot boyfriend.

“All right, Katherine, Audrey, or something actually made in the past sixty years?” Tilda asks, fingers hovering over one shelf on her truly massive DVD rack.

“Whatever Kurt wants,” says Blaine on his way to the bathroom, leaving Kurt to blink at Tilda in some surprise.

“Do you have _Philadelphia Story_?” he says. “Or _My Fair Lady_.”

“We can run a marathon,” she says, and pops a disc out of its plastic case. “If you two squish up, because that is _my_ couch, and I'm not sitting on the floor for any couple of teenagers.”

“Thank you, Tilda,” Blaine calls through the open door of the bathroom.

“Thanks,” Kurt echoes. “You really shouldn't let us take you away from your work, Blaine and I will be fine by ourselves.”

“Kurt?” Tilda says, sticking the disc into the player and grabbing the remote as she stands up. “Shut up and watch the movie.”

Blaine ends up curling into Kurt's side when he sits back down on the couch. Kurt tenses up at first, and Blaine edges back by the few centimeters of space they have on the not-terribly-long sofa, but bit by bit Kurt relaxes into Blaine's warmth, and Blaine sags back towards Kurt in return. By the time Tracy Lord is slipping off to the family pool with Macaulay Connor, Kurt's let Blaine tuck an arm around his back, and rested his head on Blaine's shoulder in return. He's tired, that's all. He's just so tired.

 

 

Kurt can't sleep.

The crux of any good 'accidentally doze off inches from each other while in bed talking' plan is that, when your boyfriend's eyes (green, without the contacts—Kurt's never seen them that way before, not even when Blaine's spent the night in Lima) flutter shut, you follow him into sleep. According to the glowing clock-radio on Blaine's bedside table, it's 1:24 in the morning. This plan is having serious issues in execution.

It's a little too warm in the room, even with the fan running, tucked this close to Blaine's warm body under the comforter. Kurt sighs and rolls over onto his left side, back towards the wall of towering record stacks. Maybe he should just get up and move to the couch, like he'd told his dad he would anyway.

“Hey,” Blaine says, sounding sleepy and surprised. “You still awake?”

“Sorry,” says Kurt, and rests his face against the pillow for a moment. “I didn't mean to wake you up.”

“No, hey, it's fine.” Blaine lays a hand on Kurt's shoulder and shifts in closer; Kurt can feel him along his back, not close enough to press together, but close enough for Kurt's pyjamas to shift against his skin. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine,” Kurt insists instantly.

“You were just really quiet tonight. I'd have thought a wizard-produced bootleg of Katharine Hepburn's only stage musical would've had you saying more.”

Normally it would have, if not over the quality of the recording than simply because, wow, Katharine Hepburn really couldn't sing, could she, but Kurt hasn't had much to say. It's been a trying day, and Kurt doesn't have his full set of moisturizers here, and of course Tilda would offer to drive a few blocks away from the apartment and then _teleport_ into his bedroom to get them if he really needed, but it _isn't the point_.

“Not all of us are so used to being the heroes of our own life-and-death situations that we can just shrug them off half an hour later,” Kurt snaps into the pillow. “I'm sorry that I've never been in a situation where I genuinely thought somebody might kill me before, but not all of us spent our preadolescence as boy wizards with whole civic monuments already erected in our name.”

“Woah.” Blaine pulls back. “Kurt...”

“I'm sorry,” Kurt says immediately. He still can't risk a look over his shoulder. He doesn't want to see what kind of facial expression Blaine has on right now. He throws back the covers and slides his legs over the side of the bed, searching for his slippers with his toes. “I'm tired, and it's making me cranky. I'll go out to the couch like I'm supposed to and stop keeping you up.”

“Wait, no, Kurt, stop!” Kurt half expects to feel Blaine's hand close around his wrist, but instead the bedside light snaps on. “Please look at me.”

Kurt still can't resist a plea like that, no matter how much he wants to be alone right now, far away from his picture-perfect, storybook prince, fairytale hero of a boyfriend. He glances over to see Blaine pushing himself upright against the headboard, hair a tornado site of air-dried and bed-rumpled curls, blinking blearily—that's right, Kurt must just be a colorful smear to him right now. 

“Okay, I can't actually tell if you're looking at me, but you stopped moving, so I'm going to take that as a good sign,” says Blaine. “Can we talk about this, please?”

“There's nothing to talk about,” Kurt says tightly, and is glad Blaine can't see him wringing his hands. “I've never been so scared in my life, and you saved us. I'm just having a little trouble sleeping over it.”

“Are you mad at me?” Blaine asks. “Please don't be mad at me.”

“Why would I be mad at you?” Kurt demands. “You saved us from them.”

“Because I wasn't fast enough?” Blaine guesses, sounding as out of his depth as Finn in any conversation Kurt's ever heard him have with Rachel. “I'm sorry you were scared, Kurt.”

“Well, like I said, not all of us can be heroes.” Kurt would really like to wrap his bathrobe around himself and flounce off right now, but all he has are his pyjamas, and they're not really made for flouncing in.

“Kurt,” says Blaine. “I was scared, too.”

It's enough to make Kurt stop, look down at his twisting hands again. “Why would you be scared?” he scoffs. “It's not like they were a flock of life-sucking monsters bent on destroying your very soul, or a giant killer snake, or—”

“I know what somebody looks like when they wouldn't mind killing me,” says Blaine.

Kurt freezes. He should say something here, something witty and light and dismissing, but all he can remember is the choking, paralyzing fear of that bathroom. Kurt doesn't want to die.

“I don't know if they really would've done it, or if they would've gotten scared of getting caught, or what,” Blaine continues, oblivious to Kurt's reaction, “but I never thought I'd see anybody look at me that way in Ohio.”

“I did,” says Kurt. “I knew.”

He'd forgotten. He'd _made_ himself forget, because that's the problem with fear. It chokes you up and makes you freeze like a rabbit caught out by a cat, turns you into a statue while two thugs with the collective IQ of a mountain troll beat up your boyfriend. It takes away all of your control. Fear turns Kurt into someone tiny, and weak, and alone, someone he hates, someone he hasn't had to be since his first day at Dalton.

“Kurt...” says Blaine, and then stops, lost. Kurt turns away. He needs to be pacing right now.

It's _hard_. Living well may be the best revenge, but that only works if you're not walking around in fear for your life. It doesn't _work_ if Kurt lets himself curl up in fear. It's not the epic life of Harry Potter, but it's hard, and some days, the pretense of control is all Kurt's got.

“I know it's not the same as going up against dragons, or vampires, or possessed diaries with nothing but a glowing wooden stick.”

“I've never actually met a vampire,” Blaine points out unhelpfully.

“Some of us have been getting by for years with nothing but a smile and a fabulous wardrobe and the knowledge that someday I'm going to get myself out of this state and never come back,” Kurt continues, ignoring him.

“I know, Kurt,” Blaine says softly. “I told you. You're the bravest person I've ever met.”

“You've never called me that,” Kurt says, and he has to stop pacing and look at Blaine for this, has to check. Blaine's said he has courage before, but not like this. But the only thing Blaine's looking at him with is total sincerity.

“Really?” Blaine looks surprised. “I mean it. Kurt...” He sighs and pats the pillow next to him. “Can you come up here?” he asks. “Otherwise I'm going to have to go put in my contacts, because I haven't owned a pair of glasses in three years and I'd kind of like to have this conversation with your face.”

“It's not a big deal,” Kurt says, but he gives in and crawls his way up to the head of the bed anyway. It's not as stiflingly hot if he leans half-upright against the headboard, on top of the covers and a few inches away from Blaine's blinking green eyes, trying to focus on Kurt up close.

“Hi,” Blaine says. His right hand comes up to cup Kurt's cheek, and Kurt closes his eyes, allows the touch. It's too gentle. It's the way you touch something that's both precious and delicate, and Kurt isn't as much of either as Blaine seems to think.

“Blaine...” Kurt says, but now it's his turn to run out of words and trail off into a sigh. Blaine lets his hand fall from Kurt's cheek, but grabs for Kurt's right hand. Kurt squeezes back.

“Courage is kind of the Gryffindor specialty,” Blaine says, quirking a little smile, “but I never really understood it until I came to Ohio. It's not about throwing yourself into a fight you can actually do something about. It's about facing up to a situation that scares you to death even if you don't think you can do anything about the outcome.”

“Like what?” Kurt asks. Admitting that there are people in Ohio who probably want to kill him doesn't make him feel brave. Mostly it just makes him feel sick to his stomach.

“Like, admitting that I'm never going home again,” says Blaine. “Or showing up at school every single day just being _you_ , instead of crawling into some incredibly fabulous closet and never coming out.”

“It would take a pretty fabulous closet,” Kurt admits.

“I was so scared today,” says Blaine. “I'm not brave enough to think about what I'd do if I lost you.”

Kurt closes his eyes; there it is, again. “Scared for me,” he says. “Not for yourself.” At least Blaine had tried to act. Kurt hadn't even managed to kick the guy holding him in the shins.

“Only because of what happened last time,” Blaine says, and Kurt's eyes blink open. “Have I told you about Cedric Diggory?”

“No,” Kurt says. The name sounds familiar, but Blaine's stories have so many gaps. “He was from England?”

“He was my first big crush,” Blaine admits. “I didn't really get it at the time, but everything he did was just so... _honorable_ , and good at stuff, and I spent all year convincing myself I had a thing for this girl he'd started dating, but...” He makes a little, inarticulate gesture.

“What happened?” Kurt asks curiously. Blaine gazes out into the fuzzy dimness of the room; Kurt squeezes his hand again, just to keep the connection.

“He died,” says Blaine. “He was seventeen, and they killed him just for being near me. He didn't even get a chance to react, or to fight back or try to run, they just showed up and he was dead. For standing next to me.”

“Oh.” The palm against Kurt's is solid, warm; Blaine moves his fingers slightly. A reminder that neither of them are dead yet. And if Kurt concentrates on that, he doesn't have to think about dead crushes and why the world has to screw Blaine over at every turn, and why it has to be so dangerous just to be a teenager and be alive.

“I couldn't do anything,” Blaine says. “I couldn't even move. I just watched it happen. And I was scared for myself today, but Kurt, if anything like that ever happened to you...”

“I'm right here,” Kurt says, and when Blaine turns his head back, Kurt's the one to cup one side of his face with a palm. “I'm not going anywhere.”

“I know, Kurt. I just...” Kurt leans in the last two inches, and Blaine leans up to meet him, lips warm against lips and tongue stroking tongue, saying all the things words can't, at this hour of the night.

“Ohio's not enough to break us,” Kurt says fiercely when they pull apart. “Not us. Not what we have.” He's not sure how this turned into him reassuring Blaine, but maybe that's how this works. They reassure each other. Maybe it's time to admit that the Great Harry Potter doesn't have any more control than he does after all.

Blaine just smiles. He's giving Kurt that look again, the one that seems so full of something suspiciously like wonder, adoration, all those feelings you have for that precious, delicate thing that Kurt is not.

“You're amazing,” Blaine says.

Blaine looks at him like he hung the moon and stars while Kurt's really only just got a handle on surviving Ohio. If Kurt were _really_ amazing, he'd never have needed to transfer to Dalton in to begin with; they wouldn't be here tonight at all, because they'd only just be getting home from some New Directions blowout of a prom afterparty. But Blaine thinks that Kurt is brave.

Ohio is all around them, right outside those doors, closing in on every side, but Blaine thinks Kurt is brave. Kurt thinks that, even at two in the morning, Blaine reminds him how to be.

“Can we turn off the light and go to sleep?” he asks. It's been a long day. He's been tired since three o'clock this afternoon.

“Sure,” Blaine says, and Kurt wiggles himself back under the covers while he turns over to flick off the lamp. It's still too hot for body heat and comforter both, so Kurt shoves back the duvet until they're only covered by the sheet, and wraps one arm around Blaine's waist from behind.

“Is this okay?” he asks tentatively. There's nothing sexual about the cuddling; Blaine settles his back against Kurt's chest, but their hips are well apart, and Kurt thinks they're probably both too tired to do anything more than this anyway.

“It's perfect,” Blaine says. Kurt's right arm is tucked up a little awkwardly between Blaine's side and the mattress, but they shift a little and everything sort of falls into place. Blaine covers Kurt's left hand against his chest with his right. Falling asleep, just like this, Blaine moving just a little with every breath, might be the most intimate thing Kurt's ever done.

“If Tilda wakes up first, is she going to be angry?” It doesn't sound at all like the Tilda Kurt knows, but then, she watched six hours of Katharine Hepburn movies this afternoon without prompting, so maybe he doesn't know her very well at all.

“No,” says Blaine, and Kurt lets himself settle against the pillows, allows himself, muscle by muscle, to really begin to relax. “We're safe.”


	3. Epilogue

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :)

“There! That one.”

“Are you sure this is the right place?” Kurt asks doubtfully, but he turns down the narrow lane that Blaine spotted in their headlights anyway. They're at least forty miles south of Columbus, and it's almost nine on a Thursday night; reading week curfew may not be until eleven thirty, but it took them more than an hour to get here, so they're probably going to be sneaking back in at one in the morning again. It should disturb Kurt that he's getting used to that.

“She said the third left off township highway 220R,” Blaine reports dutifully, and he's got his texts pulled up on his cell phone, so he's probably checking just to be sure.

It's probably the right place. It's an empty hilltop only accessible by dirt road. It's not the sort of place Kurt would be caught for anybody but his boyfriend, but according to Blaine's stories, it is a Tilda sort of place.

There isn't exactly a parking space of any kind around, so Kurt just pulls off to the edge of the road and pulls the car into park. “Is she going to try to curse me again for showing up with you before she realizes who I am?”

“Hey, when two people show up to a one-on-one session, it's her job to be paranoid,” Blaine points out.

“Not really sure how else you were supposed to get there,” Kurt grumbles, for about the dozenth time. They'd been all the way in Lima that time when Tilda had texted Blaine about his next unscheduled magic lesson. Kurt may love his boyfriend—not that he's said so yet—but there's only so far he'll trust Blaine alone with his car.

“Hey,” says Blaine, and turns around to take Kurt's hand from the gearshift and hold it between both of his. “She'll be fine. It's your birthday. If I can't take my boyfriend to New York on his eighteenth birthday, then at least I can take him to the middle of rural Ohio and show him something cool.”

Rachel called Kurt at 8:00 this morning, going on about lunch dates and running into Patty LuPone and standing on the sidewalk outside the Gershwin theater. It's probably a good thing Kurt doesn't have magic powers, since the force of his own will isn't enough for him to strangle New Directions' lead soloist from a thousand miles away.

He'll get there. With everything that's been turned upside-down so far since spring, that's really the only thing Kurt _hasn't_ ever doubted. Blaine's coming too, if Tilda will give him the chance.

Which means that Kurt really wants to stay on the good side of the only woman he secretly suspects could go toe to toe with Sue Sylvester and at least tie, but, well. For one thing, she keeps texting Blaine at the end of dates—she says it's easier for him to sneak back into the Dalton dorms when he has a legitimate reason to be out in the first place. For another...well, it's _magic_. He can't be blamed for actually wanting to see a little of it.

And Blaine wants him here, which is romantic enough in its way to make Kurt's heart flutter a little, so he smiles, and says, “I suppose then we'd better go find her, then, shouldn't we?”

There's not much of a path; they hold hands to keep their balance and trudge around the hill in the moonlight. There's not another car in sight, and Kurt's about to say something to that effect when a glowing white spark lights up thirty feet down the other side of the hill and he remembers: right, _magic_. It's a little steeper climbing down than up, and they skid on pebbles a few times, nearly tripping, before they come to a grinning stop close enough to see Tilda through the dark.

“And I see you brought the Muggle,” Tilda says dryly by way of greeting.

“Technically Kurt brought me,” Blaine says, and tugs Kurt in close by the hand he still hasn't dropped. “What are we working on tonight?”

“Well, given that you're firing corporeal Patronuses at full-strength again, I think it's time we moved on to more advanced evasive maneuvers,” Tilda says, and Blaine nods seriously.

“All right,” he says. “I can do that.”

“Where should I stand?” asks Kurt. 'Evasive maneuvers' sounds like Blaine's going to be dodging things, and Kurt is not a big fan of running, particularly when he's technically only here as a spectator.

“Anywhere's fine,” Tilda says carelessly.

“Um...are you sure about that?” Tilda hasn't _seemed_ to want him dead for the past couple of months, anyway. She nods.

“He's not going to be evading stuff on the ground anyway,” she says. “So it doesn't really matter.”

“Wait,” says Blaine. “I'm not?”

“You boys are crap at reconnaissance,” she informs them, and bends down to pick up something lying just next to and behind her feet.

At first Kurt thinks it's just a branch, but that doesn't explain the way Blaine's hand tightens painfully around his own. Then he sees the bristles at one end.

“Tilda,” says Blaine. “That's a broom.”

“And I was clearly way off on that reconnaissance thing,” she says. “So mount up. I want to see if your aerial maneuvering's as good as you say it was.”

“Tilda, I...” Blaine seems frozen, staring, so Kurt takes it upon himself to let go of Blaine's hand and give him a little push.

“Go show off,” Kurt says.

It nudges Blaine into taking the broomstick, almost reverently, from Tilda's hands. He holds it out next to himself, letting the tail droop almost down to the ground.

“It's just an old Jetstream 550, but it'll clock a little over a hundred if you handle it right,” she's explaining, but Blaine doesn't really seem to be paying attention to her at all. “Don't get more than a hundred yards up, and don't go crashing it, it's got to go back to its owner in the morning.”

“ _Up,_ ” says Blaine, and the tail of the broom jerks upright to sit horizontally in his grasp.

He's not moving, though, so Kurt leans forward and kisses him, once, just on the cheek. “Go for it,” he says.

Blaine swings a leg over the broom, bends his knees...

...and Kurt's staggering backwards from a sudden rush of wind from out of nowhere, no Blaine to be seen.

“Is he...” Kurt says, looking around wildly.

“Huh,” says Tilda. Kurt glances over, and tries to follow her line of sight up into the night sky. “Out of practice or not, he's actually still pretty good at that.”

Blaine is a darkened blur streaking across the stars, a slightly different shade of black than the midnight-blue of the sky, moving so fast Kurt's eyes can barely keep up. He races towards the tree line and wheels around just as he gets there, turning fast and sharply enough to make Kurt wince, just thinking about G-forces. Then it's up, up, up, surely higher than Tilda's hundred-yard limit, until Kurt can barely see him at all.

“It doesn't seem like the safest thing he's ever done,” Kurt says.

“The broom's got a little bit of inertial dampening so he doesn't kill himself on the turns, and I've got my wand if he falls,” says Tilda. “Not that he will. He's having way too much fun up there to come down that fast.”

A split second later, Kurt almost corrects her, because the dark speck of Blaine has started getting bigger so quickly he must've fallen off his broom—but no, it's _too_ fast, and the line of descent is angled slightly towards the bottom of the hill, and now he's close enough for Kurt to make out his shape, crouched low over the handle of the broom, streaking down to the ground at just over a hundred miles an hour, and Kurt grabs for Tilda's wrist because he's going to crash, he's going to—

Blaine pulls out of his dive at the last possible moment, rocketing back upwards at speeds Kurt's pretty sure that broom was not made to produce. He pulls to a stop maybe sixty feet up in the air, and then the broom slowly settles back down towards the earth while Kurt's heart slowly settles back down from his throat.

“You're insane,” Kurt says, when Blaine's feet finally touch the ground and he can collect himself enough to speak again.

“Three years off a broomstick, and you go right in for a Wronski Feint,” says Tilda. “I'm with Kurt.”

Blaine is grinning ear to ear, so wide it looks like he might split something. It's annoying, because Kurt really wants to yell at him, but he can't actually object properly to anything that makes Blaine smile like that. “For a real Wronski Feint I would've needed to come at least ten feet farther down. And somebody else would have to be up there chasing me. Do I pass aerial evasion?”

“You haven't actually evaded anything yet,” Tilda points out. “Just wait until I start sending Stunning spells up after you and counting how long it takes for you to fall.”

“Are you kidding?” Kurt asks, and Tilda glances over at him with a shrug.

“I'd catch him,” she says.

“That was amazing,” says Blaine, and he's beaming so hard they probably don't even need Tilda's lit-up wand to see through the darkness, so Kurt can't help but smile back.

“I'm glad you're enjoying yourself,” Kurt says sincerely. _That's_ when Blaine gets the dangerous look in his eye.

“Hey Tilda, how much would this broom carry?” he asks. Kurt isn't sure why, exactly, but Tilda blinks and something in her expression shifts sly, too.

“They usually get pretty sluggish if you try to load them up past 200 pounds, but all you really need is a basic featherweight charm,” she says. “You do remember how to do one of those, right?”

“Um...” says Blaine.

“Never mind, I'll do it,” she says, and then she levels the still-glowing tip of her wand at Kurt. “Otherwise you'll give him the relative weight density of helium and you'll have to go up after him on the broom just so he doesn't float away. Hold still.”

“I'm sorry, what?” Kurt asks flatly. Blaine steps forward, catches Kurt's eye all pleading and earnest.

“Pleeeease?” he says. “It's amazing. You'll love it.”

“You want me to go up there, with you, on that...that thing, while you do loop-de-loops and roller coaster dives and who knows what else?” Kurt asks. Kurt is not afraid of heights. He's also not suicidal. There's a difference.

“I won't let you fall,” Blaine says seriously. “I promise. You can hold onto me as tight as you want.”

Kurt really wants to say 'no'. He really does, because straddling an incredibly painful-looking wood bar while hanging in midair half a football field off the ground sounds about as close to his idea of a good time as clearance day at Target, but, well. He's a sucker. He can't resist his boyfriend's pleading face.

“If you promise to go slow,” Kurt says, raising a warning finger. Blaine just grins.

“Go for it, Tilda,” he says.

A moment later, Kurt finds himself feeling...lighter, by some significant number of pounds. He doesn't think he's at any risk of floating away, but he could definitely get enough air time to manage that standing double 360 layout Coach Sylvester was always trying to get the Cheerios to do. Blaine catches his hand a moment later.

“Come on,” he says. “Here, get on behind me so I can see where we're going and hold on to my waist.” Gingerly, Kurt swings one of his newly-lightened legs over the broom stick, then, even more gingerly, settles down.

It's...surprisingly comfortable, actually. “Cushioning Charm,” Tilda says, and Kurt glances over in surprise. “Standard on all models.”

“I can imagine why,” Kurt says, wrapping his arms carefully around his boyfriend's body. He's just a little bit taller than Blaine, just enough to tuck his chin over Blaine's shoulder and see where they're going. Not that there's much to see, in the dark, but if they're going to crash into something and die Kurt supposes he'd rather see it coming.

“All right, you ready?” Blaine asks, and Kurt tightens his grip.

“Let's go,” he says, and Blaine pushes off the ground.

They don't rocket up into the sky like Blaine had earlier; Blaine's clearly going slow for Kurt's sake. It's nice of him, particularly in light of his daredevil feats earlier, and they start off with what Kurt assumes is supposed to be a leisurely loop of the clearing around the hill. Of course, they're three stories up off the ground, and if they fall there's nothing at the bottom of their landing but a sharp _splat_ , but Blaine is reassuringly solid pressed up all against Kurt's front.

Blaine leans forward, just a little, and Kurt leans with him, and the broom underneath them begins to pick up speed. The wind is whipping at their faces, warm and moist on an Ohio spring night, smelling of green growth and upcoming summer. They zip over the car and bank right, back around towards the hill again, and Kurt is surprised to feel the smile growing on his face.

“You ready for something a little more exciting?” Blaine asks, and Kurt nods.

“Show me,” he says, and Blaine pulls back on the front of the broom and sends them zooming up into the sky.

It's a little like the building thrill of a roller coaster, only instead of clanking metal and screaming children, Kurt has the quiet whipping of the wind and the distant buzz of cicadas, and his boyfriend tight in his arms. It's not as dark as it seems like it should be up here, half a moon and a million stars just enough for Kurt to look to the right and see the side of Blaine's grin when they come to a sudden halt, dozens of yards above the top of the hill.

“All right,” says Blaine. “You want to try a dive?”

“Not like before,” Kurt says warningly, and Blaine nods. Kurt feels it against the side of his head more than sees it, in the dark.

“Not as steep,” he promises. “We'll head down towards that clump of trees there.” Kurt follows the line of Blaine's moonlit finger down towards an irregular, slightly darker splotch on the ground, far enough away for a sane kind of angle of descent.

“All right,” says Kurt, resettling himself on the broom and feeling himself start to match Blaine's grin with his own in anticipation. “Go.”

An instant later, they're dropping, nearly straight down, the broom falling too fast for Kurt's stomach to keep up with it. He swears into the wind, digging his fingers into Blaine's side, while Blaine just laughs, wild and free, and pulls them swooping upwards into a more controlled dive. It's incredible, the feeling of _nothing underneath_ , of no limits, not speed or gravity or anything at all. Blaine is still laughing, and Kurt finds himself whooping along, leaning farther forward, pushing them even faster towards the low dark sprawl of the ground.

“Blaine, pull up!” he says, but they're already evening out, zipping on a level course towards the little copse at least two or three times as fast as their earlier circles of the hillside. The trees are coming up fast, but Blaine banks a hard right. Kurt leans into it with him, the rush of it all making him tingle from head to toe, and all right, he can see why Blaine loves this. He really can.

“Blaine,” he says, raising his voice to be heard over the wind, even though Blaine's ear is only inches from his mouth. “We're defying gravity.”

Blaine laughs, and screw you, Rachel Berry and the Gershwin theater, Kurt has the real thing, right here in Ohio. And nobody is _ever_ going to bring this down.

“I love you,” says Blaine, and Kurt's whole body goes so electric with surprise that for a split second, he's completely sure he's going to lose his grip and fall off the broom.

He clutches at Blaine's stomach, probably harder than he should, and oh shit, what kind of boyfriend answers a declaration of love by grabbing you that hard around the stomach, and Kurt hasn't said anything yet, and now it's going to be awkward because he still hasn't said anything, and they're going to run into that tree—

Blaine swerves around the tree, and somehow, impossibly, Kurt finds his breath again. “I love you, too,” he promises, right into Blaine's ear, and hopes that Blaine doesn't need to be looking him in the eye to know he means it.

“You know,” Blaine says, circling the back side of the tree and pointing them back toward the hill, “it's really been a pretty good year.”

Kurt smiles ruefully in the dark, and can't help but think about just what exactly _this past year_ entailed, for him. Then he presses himself up, warm and solid against his boyfriend's back as they fly on through the night.

“You know,” he says honestly. “It really has.”

**Author's Note:**

> The records Blarry plays in his bedroom are Simon & Garfunkel's 'Concert in Central Park', followed several hours later by Side A of Crosby, Stills, Nash & Young's 'Deja Vu'. 'Concert in Central Park' is a live album from the early 80's, but the music, like CSNY, is all from the American folk movement of the 1960's. Blarry is a secret classic folk fan. I've decided not to argue with him about this.


End file.
